


Walking the Line

by DoneInLove



Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Mexico, Mild Sexual Content, Mostly Canon Compliant, Physical Abuse, Pre-Canon, Punk Buck, Slight changes to canon, Teenage Buck, Verbal Abuse, army eddie, as well as during canon, bartender buck, but only one slight instance, non-speaking cameos from Carlos Reyes and Marjan Marwani (9-1-1 Lonestar), self-depreciation, the Buckley parents are not "good people" in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:20:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24938941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoneInLove/pseuds/DoneInLove
Summary: Evan Buckley had always had a complicated relationship with things like family, friends, and his overall sense of belonging. It's what ultimately lands him in Mexico, bar-tending for complete strangers day in and day out.Eddie Diaz had developed an intense aversion to going home after so long of wishing for nothing more. Given the chance to finally return home, he flees to Mexico under the guise of visiting family that doesn't exist.Nearly eight years later, both men come to realizations that change how they look at their pasts, how that affects their present, and what that means for their future.
Relationships: Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)
Comments: 24
Kudos: 143
Collections: Buddie Big Bang 2020





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> This started as my intense need for more Punk/Emo phase Buck, and morphed into something I really never expected. ~~_this was only ever supposed to be 10k whoops_~~
> 
> A couple disclaimers that didn't technically necessitate a tag:  
> -I don't speak Spanish, but Buck and Eddie both do on occasions throughout this. If I have something super wrong, feel free to tell me so I can fix it.  
> -As you will find out, there are several things that are slightly canon non-compliant, and I also moved a couple small plot points on the timeline, so if something happens slightly wrong or at the wrong time, it was likely on purpose. 
> 
> Now, onto the credit! Huge huge thanks to jyang1219 and cobraofdeath over on the Buddie Discord for Beta-ing, and to everyone else over there that let me yell and scream and gush about this story for so many months now (you know who you are). Couldn't have done this without y'all. 
> 
> (Chapter One is the only chapter that warranted any of the TWs related to abuse; see end notes for more detailed description if needed)

Growing up, Evan Buckley always had a hard time fitting in anywhere he went. 

In elementary school, he was the weird kid with the birthmark that had way too many hand-me-downs from his sister. When he got to middle school, he hit his growth spurt and was suddenly the freakishly tall kid that happened to be way too into astrology to be cool. He only started to grow into his looks toward the end of his freshman year of high school, but his reputation as one of the top weirdos in school kept him from making too many friends. He had sat with the same group of kids since middle school, but they were far from what he would call friends and they didn’t seem to feel any different toward him. Evan had just assumed that he’d have the same, if not worse, reactions from any other group of kids in his school if he would have tried changing groups, so he stayed where he felt comfortable, with a group of “friends” that he barely tolerated. 

By that point, his sister Maddie was moving out to live with her boyfriend Doug, which made Evan the sole target of their Mom and Dad’s terrible parenting techniques. Evan was suddenly subjected to twice the amount of disappointed lectures about his lack of motivation at school or his anti-social habits. He had to sit through double the rants tearing apart every aspect of his life they found lacking. The snide looks and rolled eyes when he said or did anything they didn’t one hundred percent agree with increased exponentially.

He was happy Maddie was able to get out of the household of perpetual judgement, but he couldn’t help but miss the buffer she created just by being there. The guilt he felt over thinking that way ate at him though, because he wouldn’t wish that treatment on anyone, even if it meant he had to deal with more of it himself. 

Eventually, he decided that he might as well lean into the disappointment he was likely to get either way. He figured if he was going to be on the ass-end of one of those dirty looks or exasperated rants, it should be over something a little more deserving of it. If they were determined to hate every move he made, he was going to give them something to really hate. 

Of course, he didn't want to actually do something that would get him in real trouble or severely mess his life up in any long term ways, so he had to find a way to stick it to his parents without committing any real crimes. 

He decided to take all the money he'd gotten from his relatives on Christmas, plus his meager savings stashed in the back of his closet, and buy himself a very parent-not-approved makeover. 

When Evan returned to school from winter break his sophomore year, he looked completely different. He was even mistaken more than once for a mid-year transfer student. _"That new punk kid,"_ he heard whispered about himself on multiple occasions. 

His mother actually screamed when he walked into the kitchen for dinner the first night he put it all together. He wondered, was it his hair dyed jet black that did it? Was it the ripped jeans and studded denim vest over the black graphic tee, so different than the khakis and button ups he’d worn for years? Or was it maybe the piercing in his eyebrow, the hoop in his nose, and the rings running up his ears that pulled such a reaction out of his mother? In all the yelling and ranting and disapproving glares that followed, he would never find out, but he relished in the feeling. 

Once people at school realized that there was no new punk kid, they went right back to essentially ignoring Evan. Sometimes he heard whispers - ” _he was weird enough before, why’d he have to go and make himself even weirder?”_ His new style definitely didn’t gain him any popularity at school, but it didn’t necessarily make anything worse either, and since it garnered the reaction he wanted it to at home, he came to embrace his new look. 

His old friends, not that he really thought of them as much, were nowhere near as on board with Evan’s new persona as he was. Of course, he didn’t think it a big loss when they politely hinted he wasn’t exactly welcome in their group anymore. 

Surprisingly - or not so much so once he thought about it - another group opened up to him almost immediately. There was a small group of what Evan could only describe as misfits, and they ended up becoming his first actual set of friends since he was younger and kids were less judgemental. 

Evan had seen them around school over the years, starting as just the unlikely pairing of the school’s resident hippie girl and the only other punk kid, but growing to encompass two goth girls, a remarkably unremarkable looking boy who didn’t talk much, and a gorgeous girl he’d heard more rumors about than anyone, but never believed to be true. He always thought he might be a good fit with them, being a social pariah himself, but none of them ever gave any indication that he might be welcome with them. He’d had classes with some of them, and had made small talk occasionally, but never anything past that. As it turned out, they had assumed that Evan was actually friends with the guys he’d sat with for years, and they never wanted to encroach on that or make him choose. 

Evan ended up sticking with them, and his new style, all through the rest of high school, and even made some, albeit maybe half-hearted, attempts at keeping in touch with some of them after graduation. 

Although his parents were a little less terrible about his antisocial personality once he actually started leaving the house occasionally to hang out with his friends, they directed almost all the rest of their hatred at his “deviant lifestyle” and were convinced he was up to more menacing activities than he actually was. While glad he was getting out of the house, they never failed to question his absences like they were investigating some type of crime. Evan found it eternally amusing to watch the battling thoughts play out on their faces. 

“Oh good, you’re being social finally,” would be followed with twenty questions on where he was once he got home. Some of those questions would be interrupted by things like, “I mean, at least you’re not still just lazing around the fucking house day in and day out.” His parents were always so caught up in tearing him down that they didn’t seem to know what to do when they found themselves actually approving of something for once. Like when he brought a girlfriend home for the first time. 

All through dinner, they put on a good face and faked their way through being nice to Evan and his girlfriend up until he escorted her out the front door. Then he was greeted with a cacophony of mixed messages. “Maybe you won’t die a miserable virgin,” and accusations of his girlfriend being a slut all in the same breath. A plate slammed against the counter with claims of him being rude, followed by a dirty once over and a, “I guess something about this shit is appealing to someone. Or maybe that chick is just as fucking stupid as you are.” Neither his mother or his father could keep their thoughts straight enough to even weave together a coherent rant. Evan took it as a win.

Halfway into his junior year, Evan realized that he wasn’t the only one trying to stick it to his parents in some way. He slowly became his school’s go-to for girls trying to piss off their parents before he even noticed what was happening. He found himself at a different suburban dinner table almost every weekend, playing up the punk looks and turning on a bad-boy persona he didn’t really have. And afterwards, he’d find himself between the sheets with the girl, as she "thanked" him for a good show. He never insisted, of course, but they almost always offered. Maybe there really was something to that whole bad-boy appeal thing after all, he figured.

By the time he graduated high school, he was starting to fall into the habits he might have referred to as belonging to Buck 1.0, though not as consistently as he would years later. His parents had never given up on criticizing his looks, so he never changed them. “How is this not a phase? Jesus fucking Christ you look like a damn idiot 24-goddamned-7.” They would throw around back-handed compliments about his stream of short term girlfriends and hookups. “Really? You broke up with her? She was a good match for you, Evan. Just as fucking dumb and a face ugly enough that only a mother could love it. Hmm, maybe not even then.” When he started classes at the local community college, of course, they took issue with it. “Not even good enough to get into a real college. At least your sister could manage that, and look at her. Never thought she’d end up being the smart one.” 

And Evan was used to it, okay? He didn’t know anything else; he grew up listening to them berate every step Maddie took and was never shocked when they started doing it to him. He’d spent most of his life dealing with the harsh words the monsters that were his parents dished out to him and his sister. But the longer that Maddie was away, the less often he heard those missiles aimed at her, the more he saw red any time he heard her name fall out of their mouths. 

It all came to a head a little under a year after Evan’s high school graduation. He was coming up on finals week, and although he was only taking intro-level courses, he’d put a lot on his plate and found himself more stressed than he’d been in a long time. He would never mention anything like that to his parents because they would only use it as ammunition against him, but they could somehow tell anyway. Maybe it was because they were so used to looking for his faults that they were able to pick up on that one much easier. Maybe he just got unlucky. Maybe the world was out to get him. Whatever the reason, his father started picking him apart one night as the three of them were seated uncomfortably around the dinner table.

“Nice of you to join us Evan. You haven’t been home for dinner in almost a week.”

“I’ve been studying at the library every night. Finals are coming up.” As per usual, Evan kept his head down as he ate, only speaking when spoken to, and even then, nothing more than necessary. 

His father scoffed. “Christ, are you that worried about your finals? You’re not even at a real college, Evan. What the fuck classes are you even taking right now that could have you actually studying? Introduction to Not Being a Disappointment to Your Family? Fuck knows you’re struggling there.”

Evan gritted his teeth and took another bite of his food, chewing slowly, trying to calm his racing heart. 

“Oh honey, give him a little break, won’t you?” his mom piped up, her voice dripping with irony. “Remember how much Maddie studied her first year? Oh wait,” she snapped, turning to Evan with a sneer. “She was in nursing school. At a real university. And worked a full time job. What are you majoring in again?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said slowly, so quiet even he could barely hear himself.

“Oh that’s right! You’re undecided! How could I forget? Not only are you only working part time at that shitty grocery store, and going to a goddamned community college, but you’re fucking undecided to top it all off!”

His father scoffed. “Wasting our money on fuck only knows what, no future in sight, and you’re freaking out about your finals already? Christ, no wonder you couldn’t make it to a real fucking school. Your sister might have been a grade-A dumbass in high school, but at least she got her fucking life together in college. I mean, she still couldn’t cut it for actual medical school, but I saw that coming a mile away. I’d never step foot in a hospital again if they’d let her be a doctor. If Numbskull made it that far, who knows what other kinds of people they’d let through.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Evan said calmly, although not entirely of his own volition. He’d never spoken up against one of his parents before, at least not like that. 

It was clear that they didn’t know what to think at first either. Both his mother and his father stared at him, mouths open slightly, confusion clear on their faces. His mother broke first. 

“Excuse the fuck out of me?”

Evan figured if he’d already dug his own grave, he may as well throw himself face first into it. “I said, shut the fuck up. I’ve had enough of your shit! You can sit there and tear me down and make me feel like shit all you want, but you don’t get to do that to Maddie anymore. Not when she’s not here to defend herself. She left for a reason and you don’t get to fucking talk about her like that anymore. I’m done!”

Before he knew what happened, he felt his cheek sting and suddenly he was looking to his right. When he looked back at his parents, he saw his father’s fist still outstretched and he realized the pain he felt was from his father punching him so hard his entire head turned with the force. His mother looked surprised, but made no moves to calm her husband down. 

With everything they had thrown at him over the years, and everything he’s seen aimed at his sister, neither of their parents had ever raised a hand at either of them. There were slammed doors, heavy stomping, and the occasional items thrown, but never physical violence. Never once did Evan think he would elicit that kind of response out of either of his parents. 

Evan was honestly surprised at how calm he was after that. He stood up, rubbed at his jaw, and when he tasted blood and felt it pooling in his cheek, he spit it onto his abandoned plate of food and walked away. 

He crashed on his sister’s couch after that, at least until the semester was over. Evan never liked Maddie’s then-fiance Doug very much, and Doug made it clear that the feeling was mutual, but they both put up with each other for Maddie’s sake while he finished up the semester.

Although it was summertime, Evan had never felt farther away from warmth. Of course, Maddie was there to keep him from completely succumbing to the cold, but he didn’t know how much longer he could have gone on like that, still so close to his childhood home, all but frozen over. It’s not that he missed it necessarily, the house or his parents, it’s that he finally felt like the one place he ever belonged was no longer open to him. Evan never exactly felt the warmth of his parents' love, if they even had any to give at all, but he at least felt a sense of belonging as their child. With that cut off, he felt well and truly on his own for the first time. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW note: Buck's parents are verbally abusive to both him and, historically, Maddie. They have never hit him until the scene toward the end of this chapter, where Mr. Buckley punches Buck, prompting Buck to move out and separate himself completely from his parents. They are only talked about in vague terms from here on out.


	2. Part Two

There was never much of a question about what Eddie Diaz was going to do after high school. 

He’d known for years that he wasn’t cut out for college, not that he thought he wasn’t intelligent enough or anything. Eddie knew he would have done fine academically, but he could never really picture himself with any career that a college degree would allow him. What he could picture, however, was helping people get through what might be the worst moments of their lives. He figured the easiest way to do that was to make sure he was in the fray with them, so he enlisted in the Army just before graduation and shipped off to basic training before the summer was over. 

Of course, his high school sweetheart Shannon wasn’t exactly on board with his plan. She thought he was being reckless. That he wasn’t thinking of their future together. That it was a death wish. For a little while, Eddie was convinced that she was one wrong word away from breaking up with him, but that moment never came, and he liked to think it was because of all he did to keep their relationship afloat. When he was off training, he would call daily when able and write at least once a week if he wasn’t. And when he got his first assignment at a base close to home, he decided it was time to make a new home, just for the two of them. 

They got engaged a little under a year after moving into their first apartment and their families were ecstatic. It also seemed to calm Shannon down a bit, and combined with the stability in his assignment state-side, it helped her back off the edge Eddie didn’t want to realize she was balancing on. Of course, that stability only lasted so long. As they settled on a timeframe for the wedding and began wading into the sea of planning, a storm hit them out of nowhere.

Eddie was being deployed to Afghanistan. 

He always knew it was only a matter of when and not if, but he cursed the timing of it. They went from happily picking out color schemes to fighting about Eddie ruining their lives, as if Shannon never imagined what would happen when he was called on to serve overseas. He felt terrible about it, but he couldn’t help himself from thinking _good riddance_ by the time he was getting ready to ship out.

Now, Eddie thought he knew what he was getting himself into. He thought that he had prepared himself both physically and mentally for what he would find himself facing out there. But the life of a deployed Army Medic never failed to throw him for a loop. He rarely faced a day where he was fully prepared for what happened to him and his platoon. By the time he was told he would be heading back home, he almost didn’t know what to do with himself. The more he thought about it, the less ready he was to actually go back to Shannon; he didn’t know if he could deal with her reaction to the differences he knew she would see in him. He knew he wasn’t the same man she fell for in high school; there was no way to go through what he did and come out the same. At the same time, he wasn't sure she was the same woman he fell in love with either. They had not had a fully civil conversation for months by that point and Eddie didn't even think he wanted to be with Shannon anymore, if he were being honest with himself. He knew he, at the very least, needed some time before he could see Shannon again, with all those worries flying through his head constantly. 

So he made the last minute decision to completely ignore his responsibilities awaiting him in Texas and take some leave time before returning home. He told Shannon he had gotten news of his aunt down in Mexico getting sick and wanted to spend some time with her before something happened and he’d never see her again. Shannon, never being very close to Eddie’s family anyways, didn’t question it. He did feel bad for making up a dying aunt, and prayed that karma wouldn’t come after his very real Aunt Pepa, but he couldn’t come up with anything else reasonably believable to tell Shannon when he called to let her know he wouldn't be coming home just yet.

Eddie needed the time to himself. He needed time to adjust to himself after a year in Afghanistan; needed to spend time becoming comfortable with himself again outside of the backdrop of war. But he also needed to get away from anyone that had anything to do with his life back home. Being in Mexico let him figure himself out personally while keeping him grounded in his heritage. But it also let him completely disconnect from everything else that he didn’t have the heart to even think about yet. And if he spent his time in Mexico pretending he had nothing else to worry about except for what was right in front of him, well, no one had to know. 

Eddie spent the first two days almost entirely in his hotel room, just trying to mentally acclimate himself to normal society again. On the second night, he forced himself to venture into the hotel’s restaurant and bar area for dinner. He seated himself at a small table in the back corner, even though there were not even ten other people in the whole restaurant, and tried not to awkwardly stare at his hands while he waited for the server to come over. He only half-succeeded and quickly looked up as he heard footsteps approaching. 

He watched as a man, maybe in his early twenties, walked toward Eddie’s table with a menu in hand. Eddie smiled and greeted the man in Spanish as he set the menu in front of him. His greeting was met with a terrible attempt at Spanish pleasantries and Eddie couldn’t help but smirk. He looked back up at the dark haired man and asked, “Do you speak English?”

“Oh thank god,” the man sighed, smiling to himself, his shoulders relaxing ever so slightly. “I’m so bad at Spanish. They usually only make me wait on the Americans or other English speakers, but we’re short staffed tonight so I’ve been doing my best but it’s rough, as I’m sure you can tell. And now I’m rambling. I’m so sorry.”

Eddie laughed and shook his head. “No need to be sorry. And I am American, actually. But my family is from the area and I’m just visiting for a while.” He let himself take in the man’s appearance as he spoke; he couldn’t have been much older than twenty, Eddie thought, but he had a slightly other-worldly look about him. The softness in his face and the ease with which he emoted made him seem still quite young and innocent, but the depth of his eyes told of a more complicated relationship with what this world had to offer. Eddie was intrigued, to say the least. 

“Well then, I suppose I’ll be seeing you often while you’re here, since I’m here almost every day at some point. My name’s Evan, by the way. And you’d probably like to order, so let me just be quiet for once and let you look over the menu.”

Eddie smiled and stuck his hand out for Evan to shake. “I’m Eddie. We probably will be seeing a bit of each other, but I promise, I don’t mind you talking. If you’re short staffed though, I’m sure you also have other people to get to, so I’ll let you go do that. I know what I want anyways.” He ordered a local beer and the tamale special he saw written on the chalkboard by the door as he walked in, and Evan nodded, smiling, and took the menu back. 

“I’ll have that right up,” Evan said, turning on his heel and walking back toward the bar on the other side of the room. Eddie, for lack of anything else to do, watched Evan move around the room as he entered Eddie’s order on a computer, grabbed his and another beer out from underneath the bar, dropped them off with Eddie and another solo diner nearby, and walked into the kitchen to get another table’s food. 

Evan seemed to be the only person working the floor that night, but when Eddie checked in the previous morning, he’d seen into the restaurant on his way through the lobby and realized that there must have been a uniform for all the servers and bartenders, since Evan was wearing almost exactly what the woman behind the bar the other day had been. It was a simple combination of black slacks, white button up shirt, and black bow-tie, but it seemed they were allowed to make it their own after that. The woman he’d seen in passing had worn a pair of floral heels and a matching hair-clip in the shape of a large flower. Evan, it seemed, had opted to roll his shirt sleeves up to the elbows, had added black suspenders, and was wearing a pair of black combat boots barely visible under his slacks.

When Evan brought out his meal, the setting sun outside the window next to his table glinted off something near his eyebrow and drew Eddie’s attention to the spot. He’d seen the pink discoloration on his eyebrow when Evan first came over, and assumed it was a birthmark of some sort, but with the sunlight beaming in, Eddie could see that there was something else there as well. It didn’t look like a piercing at first glance, but Eddie soon realized that it was just clear, like he didn’t want it visible. 

Eddie didn’t mean to say anything, but that didn’t stop him from blurting out, “Is your eyebrow pierced?”

Evan reeled back and cocked said eyebrow, smirking at Eddie. 

Eddie rubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “I’m sorry, that was rude. I’m a little out of touch with normal human interactions.”

Evan chuckled, ducked his head a little, and said, “No, you’re fine. It just took me by surprise is all. But yes, I do have my eyebrow pierced. And my nose. And I’ve got four piercings in each ear. I just don’t wear any of them at work. Management isn’t a huge fan of them, but I mix a mean drink and keep the Americans entertained - their words - so they keep me around despite my looks.”

“I’d say your looks are probably a big part of your popularity,” was another thing Eddie didn’t mean to say. 

Evan huffed out a surprised laugh, but his cheeks flushed at the compliment. “And I’d say that charm is a big part of yours.”

Eddie sputtered out some sort of response to that and Evan walked away chuckling, leaving Eddie to sit in his embarrassment while he slowly ate his dinner. _’Jesus Christ,’_ he thought, ‘ _It has been way too long since I’ve been around anyone non-military.’_

\---

Evan wasn’t wrong when he said that he and Eddie would be seeing a lot of each other during his visit. Eddie didn’t go to that restaurant for every one of his meals - he did eventually venture out into the city and do some sightseeing - but he would park himself at the bar more nights than not, and he tried telling himself it wasn’t just because of the familiar face that usually tended it. As it turned out, Evan was usually only a bartender at the restaurant, and most nights there were at least two others with him, either serving, tending bar, or floating between the two. As such, Evan developed a habit of drifting over to Eddie throughout the night to strike up conversation, and oftentimes stood hunched over the bar for long swathes of time just talking to Eddie and getting to know him. 

Around Eddie’s third night in a row of this routine, he saw Evan fumble over taking the order for someone who spoke a very heavily accented Spanish and made no indication that she spoke any English whatsoever. Thankfully, one of the other servers swooped in and helped finish taking the woman’s order, waving a very exasperated Evan away. 

When he found his way back to Eddie, he couldn’t help but ask, “So how’d you end up tending bar in Mexico if you barely speak Spanish?”

Evan let out a breathy laugh. “God, that’s a long story. And not in the I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it kind of way, but in the legitimately long as hell story kind of way.”

It was moments like that where Eddie saw clearly why Evan was their main bartender at night. While he was holding the conversation with Eddie, he had also started working on another round of drinks for a different customer who had gotten his attention while he was speaking to Eddie, all without pausing once. 

Eddie watched him move effortlessly behind the bar, seeing a piece of his long black hair fall out from behind his ear as he shook the other man’s drink, and having the very unexpected urge to reach out and tuck it back in. Eddie shook the thought from his head and watched as Evan poured the drinks into fresh glasses and handed them over to the other man. Eddie waited until Evan turned back to him to say, “I have nowhere to be. I’d love to hear it.”

Evan smiled, almost shyly, and drummed his fingers on the bar for a second. “How about this? I’m off tomorrow, and you have nowhere to be, so why don’t I show you around to some of my favorite places in town? Then I can tell you my story, and maybe you can tell me yours. What d’you think?”

The butterflies in Eddie’s chest took him by surprise, but he chalked it up to some of the anxiety he always got when he thought of telling people about what he’s been through that past year. He definitely didn’t think it had anything to do with the way Evan’s eyelashes fluttered at the end of his suggestion. Or the prospect of spending an entire day with the younger man. 

\---

They had made plans to meet in the lobby of the hotel the next morning, and when Eddie stepped off the elevator, he immediately surveyed the room in front of him. The action was partially out of habit, looking for potential threats in the area, and partially out of an excitement Eddie wasn’t particularly accustomed to feeling. 

Since he’d only ever seen Evan in his bartender get-up, Eddie wasn’t exactly sure what to look out for, other than the familiar face. What he found was a version of Evan that he’d only seen hints of up until then. The taller man was wearing black jeans, ripped in multiple places, even though it had to have been verging on 100 degrees outside that day. He had on a loose black tank top of some rock band, cut down the sides far enough to reveal a peek of toned abdomen Eddie hadn’t expected to find. The piercings Evan kept hidden at work were all occupied by small studs or rings, with one long chain connecting the piercings at the bottom and very top of his left ear, and a long bar across the top of his right. His hair, normally tucked back neatly behind his ear at work, was fluffed up in a way that Eddie thought should defy gravity and fell in chunks around his face. The combat boots Eddie noticed he wore semi-hidden while working were on full display that morning, jeans tucked into the tops. 

Eddie didn’t really know what he expected Evan to look like out of uniform, but he certainly wasn’t prepared for what he saw. He was never into the goth or punk scene in high school, and honestly didn’t really understand it all too much, but even he had to admit that Evan pulled the look off very well. 

He shook off his surprised look thankfully before Evan turned his head and saw Eddie coming toward him. A smile lit up his face and he waved as best he could with a travel cup of coffee in each hand, the sun glinting off rings on multiple fingers. Eddie cocked an eyebrow at that and chuckled. “Morning,” he greeted, coming to a stop in front of Evan. 

“Hey, bienvenidos.”

Edde laughed. “Uh, I think you mean 'buenas dias'."

“Oh shit, yeah,” Evan chuckled, ducking his head a bit as his cheeks flushed. “Totally right. I’m so used to saying 'bienvenidos' to customers, I guess I forgot what it actually meant.” He held out one of the cups in Eddie’s direction and said, “I remember you saying the coffee in your room sucked, so I figured I’d bring you some good coffee to start the day off right.”

“Ugh, you’re an angel,” Eddie said, greedily taking the outstretched cup. He tested the temperature first, and took a huge swig once he knew he wouldn’t burn his throat. “Mm, yeah, sent from the heavens for sure. But we’ve gotta work on that Spanish. I don’t know how you’ve been in Mexico for so long and still sound so white.”


	3. Part Three

Evan sometimes had a hard time wrapping his head around how he got himself where he was. When people asked how he ended up bartending in Mexico, he gave them the shortest possible, mostly true, answer he could get away with. When Eddie asked, he found himself inexplicably ready to open himself up and pour out all his secrets to the sunkissed man with the pained eyes. 

After he ran from his parents house and pulled himself out of college, Evan didn’t know where his future laid. Hell, he barely knew what direction he was trying to go in even in college. Without it, and without the, albeit rocky, foundation he thought he had in his parents, he felt directionless. Adrift in the wide expanse of the world with no say in what he was doing or where he was going. He knew he couldn’t stay on Maddie’s couch forever, and he was getting real fed up with Doug’s shitty attitude toward him anyways, so he packed up a small suitcase of his belongings, had Maddie store the rest in their garage, and hopped on the cheapest flight to somewhere other than Pennsylvania he could find. 

He ended up in Austin because of that, and the constant Texan heat kept his mind away from the chill he still held in his heart from what he left behind. He didn’t have a huge amount of savings, and spent too much of it on the deposit for the first apartment that would take him without a job, but he felt confident enough where he found himself to try and build something new in Austin. Thanks to the explosion of support from the ‘Keep Austin Weird’ movement, Evan found his niche in the city quicker than he ever expected. He got pulled into the Austin nightlife within a week of being in town, and that’s how he picked up his first bartending job. 

When he started at Elysium, he had only been there once before, and was not prepared for the world he was stepping into. Their main claim was that they’ve hosted Austin’s alternative nightlife since 2001, and when he was invited to go dancing there, he found himself surrounded by more punk, goth, emo, and any other kind of non-mainstream styled people than he thought even existed in one city. Once he started working there, he realized that they hosted so many different themed nights that he sometimes had a hard time keeping track of what was next. 

It was during the second drag-night Evan had worked where he met Carlos Reyes. Carlos was there with some friends from the Police Academy, he later found out, and no matter what he did, Evan couldn’t keep his eyes off of him. Evan had been working at Elysium for a couple months by that point, and he’d gotten his fair share of advances from drunk clubgoers, but Carlos was the first one he ever actually wanted. He also seemed to be on drink duty for his friends all night, despite not drinking much himself, which meant that Evan had the pleasure of seeing him many times at his bar that night. As Evan got ready for that night’s last call, Carlos was suddenly right in front of him with a napkin in his hands and a shy smile on his face. Evan left work that night, a giddiness he wasn’t used to flowing through him, a phone number in his back pocket, and a promise of a phone call to keep.

Evan had known he was interested in men for a long time, but it wasn’t something he thought much about, especially back home in Hershey. Carlos taught him more than he ever could have imagined in the short months they were together. He taught him the differences between being with a man and a woman, of course, but he also taught him how to be in a serious relationship. As far as Evan was concerned, a relationship in high school would never compare to one as adults anyways, and with Carlos, he learned things he never even thought about with his high school girlfriends. 

He and Carlos were good together, he’d thought. They were an odd couple from the outside, some might say - a clean-cut cop in training with a hooligan of a punk bartender - but they complimented each other in surprising ways. Evan realized he was falling for Carlos, and he was falling fast. When Carlos told Evan of his yearly trip to Mexico to visit his remaining family there, Evan asked if he could come along. 

“Wait, are you telling me your boyfriend brought you to Mexico and then just left you here to fend for yourself?” Eddie cut in suddenly, stopping in his tracks to look at Evan. They were walking through one of the places he’d found months before that always helped ground himself to reality when he was having a hard time feeling like himself. The beauty of the park brought Evan a sort of calm; a clarity he didn’t know he missed. Bringing Eddie there just seemed to fit. 

Evan chuckled and stopped as well. “No, man. That’s not what happened. But I can see where you’d think that.”

“Well, he’s not still here with you, is he?”

“No, he went back to Austin like planned. We only spent a week visiting his family.”

Eddie’s brows furrowed in confusion and Evan had to bite back a smirk. “So why are you still here? Why didn’t you go back with him?”

Evan shrugged and looked around them, somewhat stalling. He saw a tree nearby and walked toward it, hand outstretched to feel the rough bark under his fingertips. He heard Eddie follow and felt his body nearby, so he turned around and leaned on the tree as he started explaining slowly, “The day before we were supposed to leave, I told him I couldn’t do it anymore and wasn’t going back to Austin. I said I was going back to Pennsylvania to be with my family again. But I never actually planned to do that either. We went to the airport together, had a bittersweet farewell, and I watched his plane takeoff before I went back to the hotel I’d secretly booked. Got the job there within the day because they were desperate, and I’ve been here since.”

Eddie looked even more confused than before, and Evan couldn’t blame him. He’d never told anyone about that for a reason. 

“But why? You said you were starting to fall for him. What made you break it off?”

“My own insecurities. I thought I would be fine meeting his family, especially because I had met his parents and grandparents in Austin already, but there was something different about seeing him with everyone here. There were his other grandparents, his aunts and uncles, and more cousins than I could keep track of. And I never had that growing up. I’ve never met my grandparents, and my parents were both only children. I only ever had my sister, and we were so focused on just getting through each day that we never had anything like he had with his family. I was overwhelmed, and a little bit jealous, honestly. I didn’t know how to act around everyone, and the language barrier made it so much harder. But he kept assuring me I was doing fine and making a great impression and all. Still, I couldn’t help but think about the differences between us. It started as just our different childhoods, but I was spiraling soon enough, thinking about everything else that didn’t mesh. Everything about me that was bad for him. I got really insecure about our whole relationship and while I knew deep down he didn’t feel that way about me, I think I started to convince myself that he would be better off without me. And he had a life in Austin; friends, a family, a career. I had none of that. Or at least, none that I couldn’t find in another city. So I let him think I missed my own family enough to move back there, and removed myself from the equation before it could turn sour.” 

Evan didn’t know when he had slid down the tree, but he realized he must have done so at some point when Eddie reached over to wipe a stray tear away and their knees bumped. He didn't expect that from the older man, but he found it comforting nonetheless. 

They sat in silence for a few minutes, and Evan almost thought Eddie wasn't going to say anything at all by the time he finally did speak up. And even then, he was definitely not expecting what came next. 

"I get that, totally I think. I'm only here because I'm avoiding going back home. I don't think I'm anywhere near ready to take the man I am now and try to make him fit in a hole the shape of the man I used to be. I'm too much of a coward to deal with the fallout, so I'm hiding out in Mexico trying to find a way to reconcile that. My fiance is about 95% likely to call off our wedding when I get back to El Paso and I'm somehow totally fine with that, but I don't know how I could face my parents and tell them they were right all along about our marriage being doomed before it even started. How can I bring a broken man back to an already broken home?"

Evan carefully placed a hand on Eddie's leg next to his and looked up at him softly. "Nobody is broken, Eddie. I can't begin to understand what you've been through, but you are not a broken man. You may be changed by what you've experienced, but that doesn't mean you're damaged. That just means you're human. And I, personally, think you're a pretty wonderful human, at that."

"How do you do that?"

Evan cocked his head to the side and chuckled slightly. "Do what?"

"Stay so positive if the face of it all? From the sounds of it, you've been through your own hell that I can't imagine either, and you're still sitting here telling me that no one is broken, when I'd beg to differ with people like your parents out there. How do you have so much faith in humanity with all the terrors we create?"

"How can I not have faith in humanity when I have to live as a part of it?" Evan countered, shrugging. "Sure, humans do terrible things sometimes, but we also do amazing things. And I for one, would rather focus on the positive things we can do than dwell on the negatives we might be capable of."

"Dios mio," Eddie sighed, the noise pulling Evan's eyes back to his face with a quirked eyebrow. The look on the older man's face was almost completely unreadable as they stared at each other, Evan waiting for Eddie to make some kind of movement. Evan only realized his hand was still on the other man’s leg when Eddie covered it with his own, his thumb brushing the back of his hand softly. “You amaze me. You have such a bright outlook on things that can be so dark. Like a beam of moonlight on a pitch black night. Gorgeous.”

“You’re one to talk,” he responded, not fully aware that he even spoke. Evan was lost to the tide that was Eddie Diaz’s eyes and had the fleeting thought that he wouldn’t mind one bit if that look was trained on him every day for the rest of his life. Eddie, with his angled jaw covered in day old stubble, his calloused fingers rubbing shapes into Evan’s skin, and those warm brown eyes peering into his soul; he was altogether so mesmerizing Evan could barely hold it back. 

He watched in awe as Eddie’s searing gaze melted into an eye scrunching smile and Evan found a new favorite look for the other man. Eddie’s hand finally moved from on top of Evan’s as he brought it up to tuck a piece of hair behind his pierced ear, gently cupping Evan’s cheek on his retreat. Evan’s breath caught in his throat and his eyes widened in question. 

“You make it very hard for me to not just kiss you right now.” 

Evan’s eyebrows furrowed and he found his breath enough to squeak out, “You have a fiance waiting for you at home.”

“That’s the only thing that’s stopped me up until now,” Eddie said quietly, thumb caressing Evan’s cheek. “But she’s likely just waiting ‘til I’m there to call off the wedding. She almost left me before I got deployed. She’s hinted at it the whole time I’ve been gone. And if she isn’t about to leave me, then I’ll be the one breaking things off when I get back. We’ve been over for a long time; we’ve just both been too stubborn to do anything about it. But not anymore.”

Evan really wanted to ignore the logical part of him and just let the man kiss him, but he couldn’t. “Eddie…” He shook his head and sighed, grabbing Eddie’s wrist to pull his hand away. He held his hand in both of his own and looked up softly at his falling face. “I can’t. You’re still engaged, and no matter how much I want to, I just can’t.”

Eddie laughed, an almost dejected sound, and he smiled sadly as he pulled his hand back. “Yeah, you’re right. You’re probably too good for me anyways. I really admire you Evan. You have a heart of gold on top of everything else. You’re totally right and I’m sorry for making things weird.”

“It’ll only be weird if we make it weird. Now c’mon, if you’re still up for it, I know a really amazing bakery close by.” Evan stood up and held his hand out, gripping Eddie’s tight once again as he helped him up. 

He smiled softly at Evan, his expression no longer tinged in sadness, and said, “Lead the way.”


	4. Part Four

Eddie had never been more surprised by himself than the day he made his move on Evan. It’s not that he was surprised by his feelings for the other man. Sure, he wasn’t expecting to find that kind of connection with anyone while he was hiding out in Mexico, but it came naturally enough for Eddie to not really question the pull he felt toward Evan. He was, however, somewhat flabbergasted by the ease in which he was willing to throw everything else out the window just to be closer to Evan Buckley.

He was ready, even before Mexico, for a separation from Shannon, but he had always held his marriage vows close to the heart, even if they hadn’t taken them yet. He never once imagined he’d be so willing to ignore all that, despite the circumstances. In some ways, Eddie was glad Evan appeared to respect his engagement more than he seemed to. In others, Eddie was all but ready to just call Shannon and break it off; just to get it over with so he could stop feeling guilty contemplating cheating on the woman he no longer loved. Because that’s what it would be, wouldn’t it? Regardless of the fact that neither Eddie or Shannon loved each other anymore or even wanted to still get married, they were still technically together. 

Thankfully, despite turning him down, Evan made no indication that he wanted to stop being friends with Eddie, and if that’s all he could have with the other man, that’s what he would gladly take. 

That day, after Eddie’s botched proposition, Evan took him to the bakery as promised, as well as a string of boutique type stores that the two spent hours meandering in and out of. Evan seemed to treat him no differently than before, except, perhaps, the occasional fond look shot Eddie’s way when he thought he wasn’t looking. He couldn’t help but wonder if his own face gave away more than he realized when he looked at, or sometimes even just thought about, Evan. 

When Eddie mentioned practically growing up in the kitchen with his Abuela, Evan suggested a demonstration of his cooking skills and invited Eddie back to his apartment for dinner. If Evan hadn’t just turned him down earlier in the day, Eddie might have gotten his hopes up that something more would happen, but as it was, he _did_ rather miss making a meal from scratch, so he took Evan up on his offer. 

With a quick stop at a local market, Eddie was soon enough elbows deep into a family recipe and up to his eyeballs with adoration for the younger man. Evan had taken off all his rings and placed them in a bowl on top of the microwave when Eddie suggested he get a hands on lesson in traditional Mexican dinner preparation. It turned out, not only was Evan terrible at the language, he was pretty terrible in the kitchen as well. By the time they were setting down to eat, Eddie had laughed harder than he had in months, all at the expense of Evan. 

“Before we started, I was going to suggest I could start teaching you some more Spanish, but now I think I need to teach you how to cook on top of it all,” Eddie said, grinning as the younger man across the table blushed and ducked his head. 

Evan took a drink of the beer in front of him, almost like he was trying to wash away the blush, and then nodded. “Both would be welcome at this point.”

And so their new routine was built. 

For the next two weeks, when Evan was working, Eddie would be occupying a stool at the end of the bar, quizzing him every time he swung by on Spanish vocabulary and grammar. If he worked the day shift, Eddie would drag him through the market on his way home, giving him simultaneous lessons on food related terms in Spanish and their relation to certain recipes. Then, Eddie would walk him through a recipe for dinner, they would eat together, and then they usually sat down to watch some TV show or movie to wind down. When Evan worked the night shift, if he felt up to it, Eddie would invite him up to his hotel room for beers and a movie, typically in Spanish, or with Spanish subtitles, or sometimes a classic _telanovela_ episode or two, to give him a more passive way to absorb the language. On Evan’s off days, he’d usually sleep in a bit before either calling Eddie's hotel room to invite him to come over, or by just inviting himself to Eddie’s room, where they would decide if they wanted to spend more time out and exploring the area, or stay in and take it easy.

By the end of the second week, Eddie was surprised to realize that that much time had passed and that they had spent so much of it together. He was even more surprised to realize that he still wanted to spend even more time with Evan and that he was beginning to think less and less of what awaited him back in Texas. For the time being, he was happy ignoring his responsibilities and pretending he had nowhere else to be than in Mexico with Evan. 

Of course, he could only ignore his life for so long before it came calling, asking where he was at. 

That came in the form of Shannon calling him one night when he and Evan were watching a _telanovela_ in his room, much later than he’d ever gotten a call from her yet. 

It didn’t matter how little he was invested in his relationship with Shannon at that point, Eddie was still shook to his core with worry when he saw her name come across the screen of his phone at one in the morning. 

He sat straight up, fumbling for the remote to mute the TV, and answered the phone, “Shannon? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“Am I okay? Am I oh-fucking-kay?” her voice rang out, dripping with anger. “Are you kidding me right now Eddie?”

“What’s going on? It’s one in the morning Shan.”

Evan looked over at him with concern, eyebrows furrowed and a frown on his face. He motioned toward the door and made a gesture with his hands, like he wasn’t sure if Eddie wanted him to leave or not. Eddie shook his head and mouthed, ‘no, stay.’

“I know full well what time it is. I’m not a fucking idiot.” 

Eddie had only heard her so angry one other time, and it was when he told her he was shipping out to Afghanistan. 

“I know that. I wasn’t trying to say you were. I’m just worried is all. What’s going on?”

“I’ve hit my limit Eddie, that’s what’s going on.” Her voice was lowering slightly, which Eddie knew wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Sometimes she was scarier when she was quiet than when she was yelling. “I’ve been going back and forth all day on whether I was going to call you and I’ve hit my fucking limit. I had to do this before I did something stupid.” She took a deep breath and started again, much calmer. “I talked to your parents this afternoon. I was getting sick of your run around about when you were coming home, so I called to see if you told them anything you didn’t tell me. Turns out you’ve been telling us all different stories. That doesn’t even bother me as much as the fact that you’ve been lying to me about this whole damned thing!” Her voice pitched up at the end and Eddie knew to pull the phone away from his ear for her next sentence. “You don’t have a sick aunt in Mexico! You don’t even have a _healthy_ aunt in Mexico! What the actual fuck Edmundo Diaz? I can’t fucking believe you’ve lied to me about this whole thing! And where the everloving fuck have you been if you aren’t in Mexico?”

Eddie was wholeheartedly never expecting to have that conversation, so he had no idea what to say. What came out was just a stammered, “Uh, I actually am in Mexico. That part’s true.” He saw Evan flinch out of the corner of his eye and wondered which part that was directed at. He’d be willing to bet it was his response, though. 

That comment just set Shannon off again, of course. “What the hell do you mean you’re in Mexico? What the fuck are you doing if you’re not visiting family? Are you shacking up with some hot little Mexican chick? You know what, I don’t even care if you are. I don’t care if you’re with someone else Eddie! You wanna know why? Because we’re fucking _done_. We’re over! I don’t have to put up with this shit. First you leave me for a year to go to Afghanistan. Okay, I get that I guess. I’ve had time to cope with that. You’re serving our country. Fine. But now you’re back and you can’t even come home? You run away to yet _another_ fucking country to get away from me for even longer? That’s just fucking fine. I should have had the balls to leave your ass before you went overseas. Well now I have them! I’ve already cancelled everything that was still booked, so the wedding is officially off, alright? The second you get back here, you’re taking your damn ring back and packing your shit, because we are done. You got that, Eddie? We’re done! Fucking done. And boy oh boy do I have a fucking surprise for you, when you get here. You just _wait_ until you find out the secret I’ve been fucking keeping, jackass.”

Eddie slowly pulled the phone away from his ear when he heard the tell tale beeping of the call disconnecting, and just stared at the offending piece of technology in his hand, completely in shock at the conversation. If you could even call it that, when Eddie barely got a word in edgewise. He almost forgot Evan was still there, until he reached a hand out to place on Eddie’s leg. 

“Are you okay?” Evan asked softly, almost like he was afraid of spooking him. 

Eddie shook his head and sighed. “Uh. Yeah, actually. I wasn’t expecting that, obviously. Although I think in a way, I kind of was.” He set his phone on the side table and dragged his hands down his face, groaning. “I mean, I told you a couple weeks ago that I was expecting her to leave me when I went home. I just didn’t really think we’d have this conversation over the phone. I don’t think I ever expected her to find out I was lying to her about this; I just thought we’d break up because of everything else that was wrong between us.”

“Well, from the sound of it, this was probably just the final straw.” Evan ducked his head and grimaced. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to listen, but she was just really loud, it was hard for me not to hear everything she said.”

Eddie shook his head and laid a hand on Evan’s. “Don’t be sorry. I told you already her and I weren’t exactly happy together. Now you can see what I meant by that. This isn’t the first time we’ve had fights like that. This has been a long time coming. I think I’m actually kind of relieved that it happened like this over the phone, honestly. Now I don’t have to be so anxious about what I’m expecting when I actually do go back to Texas. Well, I guess except for whatever secret she was talking about. It’s a weird kind of weight off my shoulders, I guess, even though now I’m kind of nervous to see what surprise she has.”

“Shit, yeah…I mean, even without that part, that was kind of a rough call. You sure you’re alright man?”

Eddie smiled, albeit a little sadly, and nodded. “Yeah, I’m good. Now, if you’re still up to it, we do have an episode to finish, even if we probably missed like three plot twists by now.”

\- - -

Eddie almost expected a followup phone call from Shannon at some point in the days after, but nothing came. He did get a call from his mother the next morning, gently chiding him for all the deception. Of course, he didn’t exactly lie to his parents like he did to Shannon. He only told them that he was spending some time alone to work on himself before he came home, and that was technically the truth. And if he conveniently left out his pending separation, it was only because he didn’t want to do that over the phone, not because he didn’t want to hear his parents tell him again why Shannon was a bad choice as a life partner. That was just a bonus, Eddie tried to reason with himself. 

“So when are you going back?” Evan asked one afternoon, a few days after his call from Shannon, the younger man unknowingly tuning in to the very battle Eddie was having with himself on the inside. 

As a not-so-slick deflection, Eddie asked, “¿Puedes decirlo en español?” 

Evan smirked as he leaned over the bar. “Yo puedo. ¿No puedes evitar la pregunta?”

Eddie laughed and shook his head. “Damn, okay, you got me. Good job with that by the way. You’re getting way better. I don’t even remember teaching you ‘to avoid’.”

“And yet you’re still doing just that. ¿Cuándo vas a casa?” 

With Evan’s deep blue eyes staring a hole into him, Eddie gave it up and groaned. “I don’t know honestly. I really probably should go soon, but it’s kind of the last thing I want to do right now.”

“Aren’t you technically on vacation from work right now? Surely that’ll run out eventually.” Evan crossed his arms over the bartop and propped his chin on his forearm. “I don’t know a whole lot about the military, but I can’t imagine you have much more than a month of vacation time saved up, unless you guys get a lot more than I’m thinking.”

Eddie took another long drink from his soda and started playing with the label on the glass bottle as he set it back down. “I didn’t take much leave time when I was working Stateside, so I had most of it roll over, and with being deployed, I didn’t have much of a chance to use any this past year either, so I actually have a lot of time off banked. I could stay here for another two weeks and be fine.”

“But are you going to?”

He sighed, flicking a piece of damp paper off his finger onto the bartop. “If I don’t ask for an extension on my leave, then I need to be back in Texas by Friday. I wouldn’t need to report to work until Monday morning, but the Army is a little different than most with leave time.” 

“Today’s Monday, Eds.”

Eddie sighed and nodded. “Yeah, sure is. And I have to let my supervisor know by tonight if I want to extend my leave. Which is why I’m having a bitch of a time figuring out what I want to do.”

Evan was quiet for too long. Eddie wasn’t used to there being a lull in the conversation when it came to him and Evan. There's never been a stretch of silence like there was then, only broken by Evan saying, “I don’t want you to leave,” with an expression on his face that was somehow surprised, like he didn’t expect himself to say what he did. He grimaced and stood up straighter, looking Eddie right in the eyes again. “What I mean is, I know you have to leave eventually, and I know deep down that it’s probably best if you leave sooner rather than later, but I also know that I really like having you here and spending time with you. And I would, if I’m not overstepping that is...I would very much like it if you, y’know, if you wanted to, um... you could stay with me the rest of the time you’re here?” 

Eddie’s dour mood almost instantly lifted at the stumbling proposition Evan was bringing to the table. It was in part due to the light pink dusting his cheeks, as if he were somehow embarrassed by his own words, and in part due to the question he raised in and of itself. Eddie couldn’t help but chuckle warmly at Evan before answering. 

“I would like that very much, actually.”

Evan’s blush deepened, but his mouth formed one of the bright smiles Eddie loved on him. “Yeah?” he asked, sounding almost breathless. 

Eddie nodded. “Absolutely. And the answer to this won’t change that at all, but I need to know. Are you asking this in a friend capacity?” Eddie lowered his voice slightly and leaned closer. “Or is this in...some other capacity?”

Strands of black hair fell loose from where it was tucked behind Evan’s ear as he ducked his head, slowly leaning back down as he looked at Eddie. He bit his lip and made a show of his eyes lingering on Eddie’s own lips, before pulling them back to meet his eyes. The blushing and stumbling over words was almost instantly swapped for a low, sultry voice, his confidence pulled out of seemingly thin air. “I was thinking more along the lines of what you mentioned a few weeks ago. I’m actually off Wednesday and Thursday, and don’t work until Friday night, so I thought I could help you make the most out of your last few days in Mexico. Send you off with something to remember it by. Remember _me_ by.”


	5. Part Five

Evan knew - of course he _knew_ , deep down - that Eddie wouldn’t stay in Mexico forever. Hell, Evan wasn’t planning on staying there much longer himself. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise when Eddie told him he was leaving by the end of the week. Yet somehow, the news hit him in a way he never expected to feel. 

He stayed in Mexico after Carlos left because he couldn’t see himself fitting into the other man’s life. He loved him, probably, but he wasn’t able to envision a future where he had a place with Carlos and his family that he fully belonged in. 

Now, did Evan love Eddie? Probably not, he thought. At least not yet; he could absolutely see himself falling in love with him if they had more time together. And maybe he couldn’t exactly see himself as a part of Eddie’s future, but he wasn't even sure Eddie knew what his future looked like. Even still, Evan was having a hard time seeing his own future without the other man, or at least, he maybe enjoyed the vision of their future together a little too much. 

Evan felt lost when he left Pennsylvania, and he found his niche in Austin. He thought that’s all he was looking for when he left home. He didn’t realize that he was looking for more until he felt himself with those same lost and alone feelings radiating throughout his body even while surrounded by the extended Reyes family. 

Evan thought he was just looking for a place where he finally fit in. But he had that in Austin. He had that with Carlos and his friends. And it still wasn’t enough to quell that bone deep longing Evan felt. No matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t look past his insecurities when it came to Carlos’ family and his space in it. The Reyes family all liked Evan just as much as he liked them, and they attempted to welcome him into their family with open arms. It was the cloud of resentment Evan held for his own past that wrapped him up and held him back from that embrace. He couldn’t bring himself to overcome those feelings and, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t feel like he had the right to a spot in that family dynamic. He couldn’t make himself belong. 

What Evan had expected even less than the disappointment he felt from Eddie’s news was the realization of why he felt that way. He couldn’t see himself as a part of Eddie’s existing family because he had never met any of them. But he could very easily see himself building a family with Eddie, and that’s what scared him. 

Evan had been spending the previous year just trying to keep himself at least mentally afloat. He was trying to find where he belonged after leaving his parents’ stifling grasp. He wasn’t thinking of his future; he was trying to survive in his present. Growing up was much of the same; doing what needed to be done to make it to tomorrow, and not much further. He didn’t have the energy to think of what happened later on. Maybe that’s why he felt lost in college. He had no idea what he wanted to do with his life because he still sometimes had a hard time believing that he had a life to live that extended farther than the most immediate of futures. 

So the fact that this gorgeous, brave, kind hearted man could come into his life and so unexpectedly turn it on it’s head? Evan didn’t know what to do with that. 

He had flashes of a life he never dreamed of running through his head every time Eddie smiled at him. A house, ever-changing in his fantasies; sometimes a white fence out front with a dog running around, sometimes a large front yard with neatly trimmed flowers lining the walkway to the house. No matter what the house itself looked like, there was always a smiling Eddie waiting for him in the front door’s frame. 

He had an almost reverse deja-vu reaction most times Eddie tried teaching Evan a new trick in the kitchen. Visions of a very different looking kitchen, and a slightly different Eddie - older, his mind supplied - with the extremely different sound of a child’s laughter in the background replacing the quiet drone of Evan’s TV in his living room. 

He woke up from dreams much more content than usual because of the subject of them. Visions of waking up next to a sleepy Eddie danced across his eyelids, never failing to increase the aching in Evan’s chest when he actually did wake up and it was in an empty bed, or on the couch in Eddie’s hotel room. The blankets were always cold next to him, no matter how much his brain was trying to convince him they would be warm again if he just closed his eyes and dreamt it into existence. 

Evan knew he shouldn’t have invited Eddie to stay the rest of his time in Mexico with him. He really shouldn’t have clarified that he meant it in more than a platonic way. He _definitely_ should have been more upset with himself at how excited he was to have Eddie agree. Evan knew, even somewhat vaguely, what it might do to him to have solid memories to take over the fantasies. He thought that it could potentially work out; he could take the three days with Eddie all to himself and give all the feelings and whatever other mess he had in his head a healthy way out. He also knew that it could be the exact opposite; those three days could have given Evan a small taste of something that might have been amazing, but didn’t even have a chance to start before it ended. 

But no matter the potential outcome, or what Evan should or shouldn't have done, there was no way he could turn back once he saw those brown eyes shining with excitement. 

So they decided that Eddie would go try to figure out how to cancel his hotel room early and pack up his things while Evan finished out his shift. Then they would meet in the lobby one last time to head back to his apartment. 

As Evan clocked out, he thought to himself that he didn’t really know what he was about to get himself into. He’d been scheduled the opening shifts all that week, which meant that he and Eddie had over half of the day left together that first day. Evan’s promises of giving Eddie something to remember him by floated to the forefront of his mind, making him blush, with no one around to see. And that night aside, this arrangement meant that Evan would be _coming home to Eddie_ the next afternoon. That in and of itself was enough to make Evan’s heart flutter in a way he wasn’t used to feeling. He wasn’t sure just how much faux domesticity he could handle when he knew the other man was leaving at the end of the week. And just how did he think he was going to be able to deal with _waking up next to Eddie_ four days in a row? 

By the time Evan unlocked his front door and Eddie followed him in, he was practically vibrating with the weirdest mixture of excitement, anxiety, and the fairest amount of resentment at himself for letting this happen despite how much it might hurt him when it ended. He’d hoped that none of those feelings were overly evident on his face as he turned to hang his keys on the hook by the door and caught Eddie’s eyes. 

“Are you sure this is okay, Evan?” he asked, shrugging a duffle bag off his shoulder and letting it hit the ground with a soft thud. 

“Yeah of course,” he said, a little voice in the back of his head yelling at him the opposite.

Eddie gave him a long, searching look that made Evan think his dueling emotions might be more visible on his face than he’d hoped. Eddie started again, slowly, “I mean, if you change your mind or anything, you know you can tell me, right? I don’t want to impose or anything, and I know we said -”

Evan stopped thinking. He turned off the part of him telling him all the reasons he should change his mind after all and took the three steps forward that he needed to be completely in Eddie’s personal space. That motion, maybe because of the sudden return of Evan’s confidence, cut Eddie off before he could finish his sentence. 

He knew, objectively, that he was taller than Eddie. They’d spent enough time together thus far that he knew that fact plenty well. But being mere inches from him, with Eddie’s big brown eyes gazing up into his expectantly, Evan couldn’t help but cherish that height difference and take slight advantage of it. 

Evan brought his hand up to slide around the back of Eddie’s neck, and he saw his tongue come out to wet his lips as Evan leaned in closer. He walked him back into the door they’d barely made their way past and gently pushed him against it, one hand on his hip and the other still on his neck. When he couldn’t stand to wait any longer, he leaned down and pressed a long-awaited kiss on Eddie’s lips. 

Eddie seemed to get his bearings almost instantly with the kiss and gripped Evan’s hips with both hands. His mouth moved against Evan’s in the best way and any residual worry he had about what they were doing evaporated. 

Evan slowly pulled away, his thumb caressing the side of Eddie’s neck as he laid one more light kiss on his lips, and smiled softly. “I promise, this is more than okay. Now c’mon, let’s get you settled and figure out what we’re making for dinner. Plus, I need to change out of this crap.” He took a step back, gesturing at his uniform with a smirk before and holding out his hand to Eddie. 

Eddie ducked his head and chuckled, his smile bright in a way that caught at Evan’s heart. He leaned down to pick up his duffle bag and took Evan’s hand in his. “This is very sweet, but I know where your bedroom is. You don’t have to lead me there.” 

“Shut up and just let me be chivalrous, alright?” Evan chided, laughing.

Despite his initial anxiety, Evan was able to relax enough throughout the night to realize that this was exactly what he and Eddie had done a dozen times over again, only with small additions to their normal routine. 

They decided on a recipe that Eddie had already shown Evan, so they took turns moving around each other in the kitchen like they'd done before. The differences came easily, like when Eddie scooched behind Evan to get to the sink and laid a quick kiss to his neck as he passed. When Eddie splashed some sauce up on his face and Evan reached over to wipe it away, cheekily sticking his finger in his mouth to lick it clean, eyes locked with Eddie. And when they sat down to eat finally and Evan poured them glasses of wine instead of their usual beers and linked their feet together under the table. 

After dinner, when they would have normally watched a movie as half of an excuse for Eddie to teach him Spanish, he instead suggested Evan find one in English. Once they settled on one, Eddie scooted closer and wrapped his arm around Evan’s shoulder. He found it almost too easy to sink into the arms of the other man, leaning his head on Eddie’s shoulder once the movie picked up, and melting under the hand running softly through his hair. 

It’s when the movie ended that the larger changes started rolling in. 

Normally, if Evan had to work in the morning, they would have finished their movie and Eddie would have set up the couch as his bed. But as the credits started rolling, neither of them made any moves to get up off the couch, or uncurl themselves from each other. Slowly, Eddie turned his head and asked, “What time do you have to go in tomorrow?”

Evan moved his head, almost nuzzling further into Eddie’s neck, and tried to meet his eyes. “I don’t have the real early opening slot, so they don’t need me until eight. I’ll probably get up a little before seven.”

He knew why Eddie was asking even before he eyed the clock on the far wall. Eddie looked back to him and asked slowly, “Were you planning on going to bed here soon?”

Evan huffed out a small laugh and slid his hand from where it was resting on his own thigh over to Eddie’s, just rubbing his thumb back and forth. He lifted his head up and leaned even closer to Eddie, whispering just over his lips, “I could be convinced to stay up a little longer.”

The corner of Eddie’s mouth turned up and the hand on the back of Evan’s head pushed them together, this kiss more intense and needy than their first. Evan’s hand tightened almost unintentionally on the other man’s thigh as he pressed himself further against his side. Their mouths moved against each other with a heat and urgency that Evan wasn’t exactly expecting, but accepted greedily. Eddie pulled his other hand around to Evan’s hip once again, and used his grip to direct him to move. He got the hint instantly and shifted his weight so he could throw a leg over Eddie’s to straddle him. Evan moved his hands to Eddie’s shoulders and shivered at the feeling of his muscle rippling under his shirt against Evan’s chest once he was settled on his lap. 

That wasn’t anything that he had done since he made Mexico his temporary home, but he hadn’t realized quite how much he missed it until he had another man underneath him again, thick muscle moving against his own, five o’clock shadow scratching his face in the best way. And the way that Eddie worked his mouth against Evan’s was something else entirely. 

What he had with Carlos was amazing, and he had nothing but good memories associated with any time they were together like that, but there was something so different in the way Eddie touched him; something that made it just that much easier to let the crashing waves of desire pull him under. 

Evan lost complete track of time. One minute, Eddie was pulling his hair just hard enough to tilt his head back so he could nip and kiss along his throat, and the next, their clothes were on the floor and Eddie was above him on the couch, kissing down his torso. Between the wet heat engulfing him and the fingers pressing bruises into his hips, Evan could barely tell up from down, his eyes scrunched up and mouth open in a constant flood of gasps and breathy moans. 

When he got a chance to get his hands back on something other than Eddie’s soft hair, he spent his time worshipping every stretch of muscle he could reach, drinking in every keening noise Eddie made. He’d gotten a chance over their time together to see vast changes in the other man, but nothing compared to the stark difference in the closed off and socially awkward man Evan first met and the man underneath him then, so open and expressive as he came undone with Evan’s mouth around him.

Add that to the man he saw only minutes later, walking out of his bathroom in low slung sweatpants and the softest smile on his face aimed right at Evan, and he knew once again he was going to have a hard time saying goodbye. 

When Evan passed him by the dresser on his own way to the bathroom, Eddie smiled gently and leaned down to kiss him quickly, almost as if it were a cover for the light pinch he gave Evan’s ass at the same time. With a short chuckle, Evan walked the rest of the way to the bathroom and closed the door behind him. He stood at the mirror and stared himself down, like that would make him face his reality.

That reality being, he had no idea how he was going to handle himself once Eddie finally left. 

Looking himself in the eyes, still naked, his chest and neck still splotchy from arousal, he made a pact with himself. He told himself that he could have the next three days to indulge in whatever Eddie was willing to give him and he would do his best to give the same back. But once Eddie left, Evan would finally address the elephant in the room that followed him from Pennsylvania to Texas to Mexico; his future.


	6. Part Six

One of the hardest things Eddie had ever had to do was leave Evan Buckley. Of course he faced incalculable difficulties in Afghanistan, but he had trained for those. Yes, they hit him harder than he expected and changed him to his core, but there was still a certain level of preparedness that he had to back him up there. 

He wasn’t prepared for what it would mean to leave Evan. He had no training on what to do when he was confronted with the reality of what it could do to him to spend two full days and then some living a fantasy with a man that he was never going to see again. He had no idea how to deal with what that would do to him. 

But one thing he did know was that he would never have been able to leave him if he had to actually say goodbye. If he had to face that sweet man and tell him that he truly cherished their time together and that he wished he didn’t have to leave, well, he just wouldn’t. He would turn back around, unpack his bags, and figure the rest out later, just so he didn’t have to leave. 

So he made himself leave Friday morning before Evan woke up. 

He had discretely packed up as much as he could the night before, and that morning, snuck around as quiet as possible to gather the rest and make his way out of Evan’s apartment. 

Eddie wasn’t proud of it. He was actually pretty ashamed of it, if he were being honest with himself, which he started to do as he watched the Mexican landscape fade into the distance from his plane window. 

But he knew himself well enough to know that it was the only way for him to actually do what needed to be done. And what needed to be done was eating him alive. 

Eddie spent the entirety of his five hour flight in a mental battle, bouncing between his guilt at leaving Evan like that, and his apprehension toward whatever ‘surprise’ Shannon had waiting for him back home. 

By the time Eddie's plane landed, he had exhausted himself mentally to the point that he was almost tempted to get a hotel for the rest of the day just to get some sleep, and worry about dealing with Shannon the next morning. He knew that wouldn't go over well, though, so he forced himself to get a cab back home and tried to muster up the strength for whatever Shannon had waiting for him.

When Eddie opened the front door of their apartment, he was met with a surprising sense of calm. He saw Shannon's car in the driveway on his way in, so he knew she was home, but he fully expected to hear her the second he walked through the door. What he was met with instead, was a dining room filled with moving boxes and utter silence. He wasn't even necessarily shocked to see all his things already packed up, seeing as how adamant she was about making the breakup official the second he got back. 

Eddie still hadn't heard any movement or anything that would suggest Shannon was home, so as he walked toward the bedroom, he called out for her.

"Shan? You here?"

Instantly, Shannon appeared in the doorframe of their bedroom. She had a finger to her lips and a scowl on her face as she walked into the hall and shut the door behind her. 

"Shush! I swear to God, Eddie, if you wake him up…"

She didn't wait for Eddie to catch up to what she was saying before she was storming past him into the kitchen. Yanking the fridge open, she grabbed the milk out of the door and all but slammed it down next to the coffee pot. Every move she made looked like it was tinged with anger; pulling open the cabinet to grab a mug, setting it down heavily on the counter, ripping the coffee pot out of the brew station. She even managed to pour the coffee angrily somehow. 

Eddie was completely lost. Why was she so mad about him calling out for her? Who was this 'him' Eddie better not wake up? What the hell was happening?

He waited until Shannon fixed herself her coffee, stalked into the living room, and threw herself into the loveseat before he even followed. He sat down carefully on the couch and watched as she took a long drink of coffee and leaned her head back, eyes closed, a heavy sigh leaving her. 

"Shannon, what's going on?"

"I'm exhausted, Eddie, that's what's going on," she answered, not even opening her eyes. 

Eddie's eyebrows scrunched even further in confusion. "Okay but why? It's barely even the afternoon. And who is it I better not wake up?"

She opened her eyes and sat up, taking another long drink of coffee. She looked slightly less angry than before as she leaned against her knees and reached across the space between them to grip Eddie's hand in hers. "Christopher. Our son."

Eddie's whole world instantly flipped upside down, leaving him lightheaded out of nowhere. He couldn't be sure how long he just stared at Shannon before responding, but she was patient enough to not push him. 

"O-our _son_? What do you mean, our son?"

She sighed and let go of his hand, sitting back again. "I wanted to surprise you when you came home. I also didn't want you to have anything else to worry about while you were overseas. But I found out I was pregnant about a month after you shipped out. I was a couple months along already, but I wasn't showing much and thought the symptoms were just from stress, so I didn't realize it until I was about three months along. I thought it would be easier for you if you didn't know until you came home." She shifted in the loveseat, folding her legs underneath of her and cradling her mug in her hands. "Then you came home, but didn't actually come _home_. And I didn't want to tell you then, when you were already worrying about your sick Aunt. But then you didn't actually have a sick Aunt and I kind of flipped out. I almost told you when I called. I'm honestly not sure why I didn't, actually. But here we are."

"Shannon," he started breathlessly, shaking his head. "You should have told me when you found out. That would have changed so much."

"No it wouldn't have. A baby is not going to fix the mess we make when we're together. It took me a long time to realize it, but we're toxic Eddie. We are not good for each other, and if we tried to make things work just for Christopher, he would suffer far more than he might if we raise him separately. I wish I realized it before he came into the picture, but it's too late for that. Now we just have to figure out how to raise him the best we can with what we have."

Eddie didn't know how to process everything he was hearing. He didn't know how to deal with this massive shift in his world view. He didn't know how to reconcile escaping to Mexico for so long while he had a son waiting for him back home the whole time. 

Looking over his shoulder at the stack of boxes, Eddie sighed. Shannon had her eyes closed again when he turned back and asked, "You still want me to move out, then?"

"It doesn't have to be today. I packed that stuff up when I was still fuming mad. But yes. Eventually."

"Can I see Christopher?"

Shannon opened her eyes slowly and looked at Eddie with a softness he hadn't seen from her in a long time. She gave a small smile and nodded. "Of course. I just got him to get to sleep though, so please be quiet when you go in there. Once he's really asleep, he'll be out like a light, but it takes him a little bit to get there most times."

He nodded and returned the soft smile. As he stood up, Shannon finished off her coffee and Eddie took the mug from her before she could place it on the side table. He gestured to the kitchen and she smiled again in understanding. Eddie took the mug to the kitchen on his way to their bedroom, and leaned on the counter for a second to take a deep breath.

Eddie didn't know what to expect from Shannon's 'surprise', but the last thing he thought he'd come home to was a son. He wasn't sure if he was even ready to face that reality, but he knew he had no choice. There was no way he could avoid this like he did Shannon. He couldn't pretend there wasn't another human being that he helped create in the next room over. 

When Eddie opened the bedroom door, the first thing he saw was the mobile hanging over the crib. It looked almost exactly like the one he had as a baby, which he knew because his mother had kept it, amongst some of his other baby things, and pulled it out on occasion to reminisce about his childhood. He knew it wasn't the same one because the one in front of him was in much better shape than the one in his mother's keepsake box, but it stopped him in his tracks nonetheless.

The very next thing he saw was movement between the slats of the crib’s walls. As he came closer, he saw the littlest figure squirming slightly, eyes squeezed shut and mouth open just enough to see a peek of his little tongue sticking out. Eddie didn’t have much experience with babies, but even he could see just how precious this one was, and that was only partially because it was his own. His head - _Christopher’s_ head, his subconscious reminded - was covered in the wispiest layer of blonde hair, and his little fingers clutched at the air ever so slightly as Eddie watched. He couldn’t hold back the flood of emotions he felt, completely overwhelmed with them as he looked down at his sleeping son. 

Eddie’s hand came up to his mouth to cover up a small sob that escaped, and that was what made him realize that he was actually crying. He looked back up at the mobile hanging over the crib, almost as if it would comfort him as well as it’s owner sleeping below. The familiar, yet still foreign, object served as a thread that connected Eddie to that moment in a way he didn’t know he needed. 

It’s not as if he needed affirmation that this was indeed his son; he could see just from looking at the sleeping form that Christopher was entirely his and Shannon’s child. What he needed was a reminder that he wasn’t dreaming. He needed to be brought back down to Earth and for something to pull him back to the present. It was the slap in the face Eddie needed to make him focus on what was important in his life. 

His failed relationship with Shannon aside, Eddie's place was there in El Paso. It was high time he came back to reality and faced his responsibilities. He knew, when he decided to go to Mexico, that he would have to face them sooner or later, but he had no way of knowing that he would return with a completely different set of responsibilities waiting for him. He wasn’t sure how to handle the new emotions that would come with those responsibilities; he barely knew how to handle his emotions as it stood. 

That day solidified something for Eddie. He could never bring himself to regret what he found with Evan in Mexico; could never hold any resentment over the time they spent together. But he came to realize that he needed to pull himself together and do what needed to be done for his family. 

He found his own apartment not that far from Shannon and Christopher and buckled down. He worked and trained and made his way through the ranks, ensuring he was the best possible provider he could be to his son. By the time he was notified of his upcoming second tour in Afghanistan, Christopher was two years old and had just been diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy. It devastated Eddie in a way that he didn’t fully understand, simply because he had such a limited understanding of what the diagnosis meant for Christopher. 

Just as the first time, Shannon did not take well to the news of his deployment. He understood why this time, far more than he did during his first tour. Not only was Shannon going to be raising their son on her own with Eddie gone again, but Christopher was entering his “terrible twos” stage on top of a developing medical condition that they were still just beginning to understand. It broke Eddie’s heart to leave again, but he was adamant that it was what he needed to be doing. He needed to provide for his family, and this was the only way he was going to be able to do that to the extent they needed. And whether or not Shannon understood that, Eddie couldn’t help. 

After his team’s attack and the awarding of that _damned_ Silver Star, Eddie had the urge to disappear again. He wished with all his heart that he could just run somewhere to hide until he felt more like a human being again. He thought constantly of that dark haired, bright eyed man that offered him so much more than the escape he was originally looking for years before. How he wished he could run to wherever Evan Buckley found himself at that moment in time, and ignore the storm raging in his head. 

But then Eddie thought of Christopher. 

Christopher, who might not fully recognize Eddie after seeing him purely through a webcam for far too long. Christopher, who deserved the world and needed his father there to help him find it. Christopher, who had been left with only his mother and Eddie’s family and needed his father to come home. 

So as much as Eddie wanted to ignore his responsibilities like he did that glorious summer in Mexico with Evan, he knew he couldn’t. He was needed in El Paso. His family needed him to come home. Christopher needed him to come home. 


	7. Part Seven

When Evan woke up the day Eddie was supposed to leave Mexico, he wasn’t expecting the other man to still be there. He had prepared himself to wake up to an empty bed, simply because he knew he would have done the same thing if he were the one leaving. If he had to say goodbye to Eddie that morning, he didn’t know what he’d have done because he didn’t even _try_ to prepare himself for that. Evan knew, no matter what, it was best for both of them that Eddie snuck out early that morning. 

It didn’t stop it from hurting though. 

His heart still broke a little when he realized that the pillow next to him was long-cold and his apartment was deathly silent. 

Evan didn’t even think about it until days later, but he kicked himself in the ass once he realized it; he and Eddie never even talked about staying in touch. It’s not like they couldn’t have exchanged phone numbers at any point, but the whole time Eddie was in Mexico, they had no need for their phones to be able to reach each other. They were just always together, or if they weren’t, they knew where to find each other. Evan didn’t know about Eddie, but he rarely used his own phone and only a handful of people even had his phone number, so it never crossed his mind to give it to Eddie.

The more he thought about it, though, the more he thought that maybe it was for the best. Evan didn’t know if he could take staying in touch with Eddie when all he wanted to do was run to him. If he was able to talk to Eddie every day, but not see him or be with him in person, he couldn’t even think about what that might have done to him emotionally. 

So he stuck to the deal he made with himself in the mirror that first night. He got those spectacular memories of his time with Eddie and in turn, he sat himself down and tried to figure out what he was doing with the rest of his life. He knew himself well enough by then to see that if he had let himself, he would have completely succumbed to his roiling emotions like he did when he broke it off with Carlos. Evan knew that if that happened again, he might never get out of Mexico. 

He did love it in Mexico, but he knew he wasn’t meant to make a life there; not long term at least. He needed to leave. He needed to go back to the U.S., but he had no idea _where_ in the U.S. he needed to be. 

Definitely not Pennsylvania. He wasn’t ready for that yet. 

And not Austin either. He thought he had found a place for himself there, but he knew it wasn’t what he needed. 

No, he needed a new start. He needed to make some serious changes. He needed to stop moving through life like things would either fall in place for him or fall apart in front of him. He needed to take the initiative to go look for his future. To make the changes he needed so he could stop simply staying afloat, and instead forge his own path ahead. 

A few weeks after Eddie left, Evan found himself looking in the bathroom mirror once again. The reflection of himself staring back at him was one he’d looked at a million times over again. But he took the time to really _see_ what he was looking at. 

What he saw was the remnants of a scared teenager trying so hard to just make it to tomorrow without the inky darkness of insecurity bubbling up to the surface to take him over. He saw the mask he so carefully created around himself to survive his parents’ constant berating; he built them something to pick at so they would leave alone the parts of him that he didn’t want to look at. He was looking at the armor he created to survive the battlefield that his childhood home came to be. 

He didn’t need that armor anymore. 

But he realized, standing in his bathroom, staring at his own reflection, that he genuinely grew to enjoy parts of his carefully crafted look. 

He’d always had a sort of agreement with himself that he wouldn’t buy shirts for bands that he didn’t actually like, not wanting to give his money to something he didn’t support, so all of his band shirts had become a way to represent his taste in music. His flannels were certainly comfortable, no matter what. And there was just something about combat boots that made him feel good any time he wore them.

He could definitely get used to not having to worry about dying his hair before his roots came in, he thought, running his fingers through his hair and seeing the faintest of blonde peeking out of his scalp. And it might be nice to get some pants that aren’t so tight on his legs, or that didn’t have holes running up and down the fronts of them. 

But he wasn’t sure about his piercings. 

His mother was always overly critical of his birthmark, and that was a large part of the reason he got his eyebrow pierced; if she was going to complain about something on his face, let it be the thing that he could actually control instead of what he was literally born with. Evan had always secretly liked his birthmark, though, so he decided then and there to take out the curved piece of metal and to never put it back in. 

The nose piercing was an easy decision. It looked great, Evan knew that, but it was the most annoying thing in the world sometimes. He found himself twisting it back and forth constantly to relieve the weird kind of itchiness that came with a fresh piercing, but never went away for him. And when he was sick? Sinuses acting up? Pollen count high? Any time Evan felt the urge to sneeze or blow his nose, he wanted to rip the metal right out of his nose. So that was gone too. 

But his ears were another story. In his right ear, he had an industrial bar at the top and two lower lobe piercings, the bottom of which he always debated stretching. He decided he was glad he never gave in to that urge, but he did kind of like the industrial, and the lower of his lobes matched his left ear, so he figured he would keep those, but ditch the other. In his left ear, other than the lower lobe, he had an upper lobe, his tragus, and his cartilage, all of which were usually home to closed hoops. The only one of those he was partial to was the tragus, though he wasn’t sure exactly why, but he could do without the others, so those came out as well. 

He didn’t really change much about his appearance that first day, but over time he started to develop a style that really _fit_ him. By the time that he had decided on the destination of his next cross-country move, his roots had grown back enough that he could get the rest of the black cut out and still have a haircut he enjoyed. He had taken to wearing his flannels over plain tee shirts most days, as the weather started turning and the days got cooler. Most of his band shirts, cut down the sides like they typically were, had been paired with basketball shorts to become his new workout gear as he filled more of his free time with exercise to keep his mind off _other things_. 

When he received his acceptance letter from the State University of New York at Buffalo, he packed up what he needed for his new dorm room, sold the rest from his small apartment, and booked the first flight to New York he could get, finally starting to feel like he was making the right kind of changes in his life. 

Back when Evan was enrolled at their local community college in Pennsylvania, he had no clue what direction he wanted to go in. He struggled with his classes because he had little to no motivation to even be there. He was simply going through the motions, trying to make the best of it, because he knew that’s what was expected of him. 

The second time around things were different. 

Maybe it was because Evan had a different mindset from the start. Maybe it was because he finally had a major in mind, or because it was a completely different school altogether. Maybe that was just the right time and place for him to finally hunker down and get his degree. Whatever the reason, Evan found it much easier to find his niche at the University at Buffalo, once he decided New York was his next stop. 

Outside of the actual classes, he also found himself fitting in somewhere again, like he had during his short time in Austin. He found friends easily and became so much more social than he ever was growing up. 

He was also never really into sports in high school, but for some reason he decided to join the basketball team the first semester he could at Buffalo. There were a few of the guys on the team that he didn't really get along with, but for the most part, he and his new team bonded fairly quickly. He got really close to a couple of his teammates in particular, but became at least some level of friends with most of the others. 

Community college was also, in and of itself, completely different from a school like Buffalo, and Evan found those differences very quickly. For one, he was living on campus in a dorm that he shared, which he was definitely not used to doing. He had lived by himself in his own apartments in Texas and when he hid out in Mexico, so downsizing to the tiny dorm room and having to share the space with another person was surprisingly one of the biggest changes for Evan. That first year for him was full of more adjustment than he’d expected, especially when it came to his living situation. In later years, it wasn’t as big of an issue, as he ended up renting apartments with friends. 

For another thing, there were significantly more parties than he’d ever imagined, and even working as a bartender in a nightclub couldn’t prepare him for some of the things he saw at those parties. 

He actually got along with his dormmate surprisingly well, and the two of them started going to almost any party they heard about. By the time he joined the basketball team, he had less time for things like parties, but those he got invited to were so much more intense. He was invited to parties at frat houses he didn't even know existed, dorm ‘hang outs’ that got more out of hand than the small rooms could accommodate, and complete ragers thrown at houses way too nice to be trashed the way that they were. And Evan’s main reasons for going to those parties had nothing to do with the drinking, unlike so many of his friends. 

Evan was trying everything he could to ignore the aching in his heart that was left behind from his summer with Eddie. And if that meant sleeping with anybody who was interested, well that's just what he’d have to do, he thought. So Evan turned into one of their campus’ most notorious playboys in a matter of months. Anyone familiar with the party scene at their school knew that Evan Buckley was the one to go to if you wanted to have some fun between the sheets. Or in the backseat of a car. Or against the wall of a house. He only had two rules for his hookups; they had to be sober enough that they’d make the same choice either way, and they had to be just as interested in it as he was. And soon enough, Evan found himself using sex as a coping mechinism; a way to ignore whatever feelings he didn’t want to deal with at the moment. 

Evan made sure that everything he got up to outside of classes wouldn’t get in the way of his actual coursework, however. He forced himself to stay on track with every class that he ever took, no matter how challenging. Even if his friends started to get on him when he didn't go out with them, he made sure to get done what needed to be done and to hold onto his boundaries with them. If that meant no parties, then that's what would happen. If that meant pulling all nighters to get papers done or to study for upcoming tests, then that's what he did. If that meant sucking it up and hiring a tutor, then that’s what he had to do. 

He wouldn't let himself fall into the same trap that some of his friends were getting into. Some of them used the phrase “Cs get degrees” far too often for Evan’s liking, but no matter how much he tried to appeal to their common sense, or convince them to work a little harder, some of them just didn't get it. Evan just stuck to his guns and made sure that their bad decisions wouldn’t affect him. 

By the time graduation came around, Evan had racked up a pretty impressive college resume for someone who started at a community college and pulled himself out to take a sabbatical in Mexico. He had a 3.8 grade point average, three full years on the basketball team, volunteered at a homeless shelter and one of the school’s service fraternities for two years each, and even managed to squeeze in a minor in robotics on top of his mechanical engineering major. 

Evan finally felt like he belonged somewhere. He had actual friends for what felt like the first time in his life. Sure, his little group of outsiders in high school were his friends, and he had clicked with people in Austin, but none of them had kept in touch enough that he would consider them a current friend. And part of that connection he found while at Buffalo helped him find his way to something he wouldn’t have likely thought of on his own. 

Toward the beginning of his last year at school, one of his roommates’ brothers came to visit. Evan had never met him before, but had heard numerous stories about “my badass Navy SEAL brother”, so he was intrigued, to say the least. The more Evan heard from him and after a few late night, somewhat tipsy conversations, Evan came to the conclusion that _that’s_ what he needed to do after graduation. 

As he looked into it more, he came to realize just how competitive it would be, since he was entering into the process without having enlisted in the Navy. He would have had to enter through the Officer’s track, which was much harder than Evan originally thought. But he knew he had it in him. He knew that’s what he was reaching for after college. He knew he could make it. 

And he probably would have too, if he hadn’t dropped out right before the end of his training. 

Evan - or Buck, as his nickname became partially through training - excelled in most of the aspects of his training. He surpassed what he even thought himself capable of. His trainers were impressed by him day after day. But he couldn’t do what they wanted him to do with his emotions. He couldn’t learn how to shut them off altogether. Sure, he tried to ignore his emotions a lot of the time. He had coping mechanisms to try and cover up some of his emotions. But he also believed that his emotions were what made him who he was. He couldn’t bring himself to completely abandon them in the ways that were being asked of him. 

Buck could run training courses like no other and beat records held for years on physical tests. He could run circles around most of the others in his training group. But he could not lock away his empathy. Buck could not put his concern and worry into a safe, or stop feeling how he felt, even for a short period of time. He didn’t know that that would have been such a large part of being a Navy SEAL, and no matter how much he thought that’s what he wanted, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. 

So he removed himself from his training and tried to figure out what the hell he was going to do with himself after that, on his own out in California, where the training camp had been.

It was actually, yet again, one of his college buddies that gave him the idea to become a firefighter. He had just moved to Miami, Florida and sent Buck a local news story of a firefighter who dove headfirst in a swamp full of alligators to save a little boy. She was apparently gaining a ton of notoriety in Miami for her daring rescue and Buck’s friend was in awe. 

_“Dude, she’s so amazing. I need to meet her somehow so we can fall in love and she can come sweep me off my feet. We’ll get married and have the cutest kids and she’ll keep being a badass and saving people and I’ll be her trophy husband and be there for her when she gets home from being so amazing every day and just...ugh, dude, I’m so in love. I bet she could just pick me up and throw me around and ung...I love it. I so need to meet her man.”_

He never did meet her, which Buck thought was probably for the best, but he did keep sending Buck links to articles about her and her team. The more Buck read about the intense rescues they pulled off, the more he realized that he could absolutely picture himself in those same scenarios. He had always thought firefighters just, well, fought fires. He didn’t realize there was so much more to it than that. The more he looked into it, the more he knew it was the right path for him. 

So Buck signed up for the Los Angeles Fire Academy the first chance he got, and the rest was history. 

When Buck got placed with Station 118, he didn’t know what to expect from his coworkers. But he never expected to find the closest thing to a family that he’d ever had. When he thought he lost that, he found his mind slowly drifting back to the exact place it was at when he left Carlos and hid out in Mexico. It was the images of the sun-kissed man with the sad eyes he spent the rest of that summer getting closer to that pulled him out of his head. Buck may have used sex as a way to forget the feelings he had for the other man, but the memories of Eddie Diaz looking at him with complete adoration never failed to help keep him from spinning out in his own mind. 

With the second chance Hen’s phone call provided that day of the home invasion, Buck swore to do anything in his power to never jeopardize his place among the family the 118 formed.

Nearly a year later, their family opened up to a new member that afforded Buck the chance at a fantasy he never let himself indulge in. 

The day that flipped Buck’s entire world upside down started like so many others. 

Buck was already full of excitement over his latest DXA body scan and the possibility of being chosen for the calendar shoot, and was beyond ready to brag about it, no matter how much the team made fun of him for it. It wasn’t until Chimney turned and said, “Okay, _that_ is a beautiful man,” that he realized there was a new face in the firehouse. 

He just barely heard Hen laugh and say, “Where’s the lie? And I like girls,” as he turned to look at who they were talking about. He stopped dead in his tracks and blinked rapidly, trying to shake the image he thought for sure had to be a hallucination. 

But he wasn’t hallucinating. 

Standing not even ten feet away from Buck was Eddie. 

His Eddie. 

His sun-kissed angel with the sad eyes. 

The man who had been sneaking into his dreams for over seven years.

The man he never thought he’d see again; never even let himself _hope_ he’d see again.

And there he was, standing there in the firehouse Buck had spent the better part of two years making his home. 

“Holy shit. ¿Es esta de verdad?”

Buck didn’t realize that had slipped out, let alone in another language. He hadn’t spoken Spanish in literal years, not since college or the few times since then that he'd stumbled through half remembered phrases to help traumatized people on the occasional call. He definitely didn’t expect it to just fall out of his mouth like he was back in Mexico and twenty years old again. He thought it must have been that odd kind of muscle memory, like when you smell something that takes you back to a certain place in time. Only it was seeing Eddie there in front of him that pulled out his mostly forgotten memories of another language.

He just barely heard Chim next to him. “Did he just speak Spanish? Buckaroo, since when do you speak Spanish?”

Buck shook his head and said, “Uh, yeah, kinda. Excuse me,” not realizing that he didn’t even answer the question correctly. But he couldn’t just stand there while the man he never thought he’d see again stood right across the room from him. 

Eddie finished pulling his shirt on as Buck crossed the room, and looked up just in time to see him walk through the changing room doors. He looked just as amazed to see him as Buck felt. 

“Evan?”

In the back of his mind, Buck heard the echoes of whispers coming from behind him - _“Do they know each other?” “I think he called him Evan. Damn, Maddie barely even calls him that.” “Wait what is happening?”_ \- but chose to ignore them. 

“Eddie. No puedo creerlo. Shit…” He had a million questions for the other man, but none seemed right at the moment. He also couldn’t believe how much Spanish he was suddenly able to remember, like all it really took was the spark of distant memories to bring it back to the surface. 

Eddie kept staring at Buck in disbelief, and Buck was getting close to breaking the silence himself when Eddie just started to laugh. “Mierda, Evan, you look good. Very different, but good.”

Buck had a sudden flashback to how he looked that summer, and laughed right back. He rubbed the back of his neck and said, “Yeah, I ditched the last of the piercings a couple years ago. Grew my roots out after that summer actually. Stopped dressing like I was the bassist of a screamo band. But you...wow, you haven’t changed. Except that maybe you somehow got even more attractive, and I didn’t think that was even possible.” He laughed, and soaked in the light blush on Eddie’s cheeks as he continued, “Also, everyone calls me Buck now, and even though I kinda love hearing you use my first name, the team would never let it go, so, um…” he trailed off, cocking his head to the side to cap off his rambling. 

“Shit, right, the team.” Eddie looked over Buck’s shoulder to the small group still staring at them. He lowered his voice and asked, “Are they...like are you -”

“Out to them?”

Eddie just nodded.

“I don’t think I’ve ever come out and said it directly, like no announcement was made or anything, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows by now. Plus, Hen’s a lesbian, and everyone is cool as hell in general, so if you’re worried about how they’d react, I can guarantee it’d be with open arms.”

Eddie looked almost relieved, and Buck thought about what kind of intolerance he might have dealt with in the Army. He’d had his own fair share of stories of ignorance from his time in SEALs training, and he knew that was different from the Army, but it was still the U.S. military, so he couldn’t imagine what else Eddie had been made to deal with over the years. 

“Do you want to tell them about us? About our history?”

Buck laughed and looked behind him. Hen and Chimney were whispering to each other, no doubt speculating about how Eddie and Buck knew each other, and Bobby stood near them with his hands on his hips, smirking. “I mean, I think we’re past the point of pretending we’ve never met. But I don’t think they need to know everything. We can just say we met one summer, became friends, but didn’t keep in touch after we parted ways.” Buck wasn't entirely sure what made him do it, but he took a step closer to Eddie and whispered, “They don’t need to know that you know what I sound like when I come undone. Or that I still sometimes think about the grip you had on my thighs, or the marks you left there that lasted a week."

“Christ, Evan -”

“Remember, it’s Buck now,” he said, smirking as he stepped back.

Eddie groaned, but laughed nonetheless. “You trying to get me fired on my first day for sexual misconduct or something?”

Buck threw back his head in laughter and clapped his hands together. “‘Course not. Welcome to the 118, Eddie! Come meet the rest of the team.”


	8. Part Eight

When Shannon left Christopher with Eddie to go take care of her mother, he understood, but when he realized she wasn’t coming back, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He already felt somewhat lost, working three jobs just to stay afloat and relying far too much on his parents to take care of Christopher. When he got accepted to the Los Angeles Fire Department, he knew his life was about to change, but he never could have guessed just how drastically. 

Eddie knew that he was being fought over between two of the firehouses, but he was happy to find out he was officially assigned to Station 118 because it was much closer to the home he’d rented after moving to LA. On his first day, he realized just how lucky he was that Captain Nash fought so hard for him. 

He had no hopes of even seeing Evan Buckley again after leaving him without so much as a goodbye all those years ago, and even if he had run into him at some point, he never expected to be met with such open arms. He would have thought Evan might have held some amount of resentment toward Eddie ghosting him like that, but maybe he was simply a better man than Eddie was, he couldn’t help but think. 

Meeting the rest of the team meant that Eddie didn’t have a chance to find out anything about how Evan ended up in LA at the same time he did. Or how he became a firefighter at all. Or when he put on the crazy amount of muscle mass he most certainly didn’t have seven years before. There were so many things Eddie wanted to know about Evan and the years that had passed since they had last seen each other, but Eddie had to get through his first shift at his new job before he could even worry about that.

Eddie thought it must have just been his lucky day, because he and Evan - Buck, as he tried to remind himself - were off at the same time, and with his abuela watching Christopher until the next day, he decided to invite Buck out for drinks to catch up. His question was met with a bright smile and a suggestion of where to go. 

Once seated next to Buck at the end of the bar, beers in both of their hands, Eddie couldn’t help but remark, “It’s kinda weird seeing you on this side of the bar.” He laughed at himself for how that sounds, and followed it up with a reassuring, “Good kind of weird though.” 

Buck ducked his head as he laughed, a move Eddie recognized from all those years ago. “Yeah, a lot of things have changed, huh?”

Eddie wasn’t sure when he became so forward, but he reached out and placed his hand over Buck’s, pulling his eyes back up so Eddie could look into his blue gaze. He slowly caressed his thumb over the back of Buck’s hand and lowered his voice to say, “And some things haven’t changed at all.”

Buck’s eyes widened slightly, and Eddie could just barely make it out in the dim lights of the bar, but he could have sworn Buck’s pupils were dilated as well. Quickly though, he looked away from Eddie, seemingly staring off into space as he took a long drag from his beer. 

Eddie couldn’t help but notice that Buck didn’t pull his hand away. 

With a heavy sigh, Buck turned his whole body toward Eddie and covered his hand with his other, sandwiching Eddie’s between the two. “Eddie, it’s been seven years. I don’t know what you’ve been through since that summer, but I know that we aren’t the same people we were back then. What we had was...well shit Eddie, I still think about it more than I’d like to admit. But we can’t just pick up where we left off. Even if we did want to continue whatever it is we had back then, we are different people now and we would need to, I don’t know, re-learn who we are to each other, I guess.”

Eddie nodded, completely understanding what Buck was saying. Hell, Buck didn’t even know about Christopher yet, and Eddie knew that would be one monster of an explanation on his part as it was. Buck was right; they needed to re-learn who they were, but he didn’t see anything wrong with that. “That’s doable, Evan-” he caught himself with a chuckle, “I mean, Buck. We have a lot of catching up to do, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get to where we were at some point. It might just take us -”

“I have a girlfriend, Eddie.”

Everything got quiet for a second, or it did in Eddie’s mind at least. “Oh.”

“I mean, it’s...it’s complicated, I guess, but I’m still not exactly available. I’m sorry -”

Eddie shook his head, clearing it of the deathly silence. “No, no don’t be sorry. Of course you’re taken. You’re amazing Evan. Anyone would be lucky to be with you, and I’m happy for you. You deserve someone that makes you happy.”

And Eddie later found out that Buck’s girlfriend _did_ make him happy. He heard stories from the others on the team of the wonderful duo that was Buck and Abby. Of course, that was before she ran off to Europe to find herself, leaving Buck half heartbroken and fully in the dark about the state of their relationship.

And okay, maybe Eddie was being a bit harsh on this woman he’d never met. Her mother had just died, apparently, and her world was turned upside down. Eddie could understand that, and he couldn’t hold it against her entirely, in the same way he didn’t entirely hold it against Shannon for abandoning her family. But maybe that’s why Eddie found himself so much more defensive about it, getting angry at someone he’d never met on behalf of someone that wasn’t him; because he could relate. He could understand how Buck might have felt, being left behind, with little to no closure, from someone who used to mean so much.

Even before he knew about Abby and formed his own opinions about her, he wasn’t lying to Buck when he said he was happy for him. That was the second time Buck had turned him down, and regardless of the reasons, Eddie knew that he could continue being friends with him just as easily as anything else. So he put everything into maintaining a normal friendship with Buck and found himself building up a family with the other members of the 118 as well. 

Even when Buck moved out of Abby’s apartment and removed himself from the relationship most people thought was already over, even then, Eddie kept his space. He was there as a supportive friend and nothing else. Bobby and the others who had known what Buck and Abby looked like _in_ a relationship had definitely known that it was over for a while, but Buck wasn’t able to see that until then, and Eddie knew he needed to let Buck process the breakup on his own terms. So Eddie helped Buck find an apartment of his own and was there beside him for the move and all of the emotions that came with it, but he was there purely with Buck’s best interests in mind. He would have loved to be the shoulder for him to cry on, but that wasn’t what Buck wanted him for. He wasn’t about to take advantage of the breakup for his own motives. 

But he wasn’t about to just let some slimy reporter sink her claws into a newly single Buck either, if he had anything to say about it. 

When Taylor Kelly came to the firehouse with her cameraman unannounced, Eddie couldn’t help but glare at the two from across the engine bay. He _was_ in the middle of a workout, however, and he didn’t really know if he had it in him to play nice, so he stayed where he was and glared from afar. That is, until he saw Buck approach her and turn on the charm he'd had aimed at himself before; he couldn’t stop himself at that point. 

He sat up from the weight-bench and made sure he asked loud enough for them all to hear, “Hey, how you feeling? Any side effects after the crash?” He stood up and sauntered over to the three of them, trying not to glare at the camera anymore, since it was trained on him. 

Eddie watched Buck’s reaction, which was mostly confusion at Eddie’s sudden entrance, but slowly turned quizzical as Chim and Hen both pointed out how odd it was that Taylor and her cameraman were there. Eddie quickly realized that he wasn’t the only one put off by their presence, although he had to admit his own aversion had a lot more to do with Buck than anything else. 

That day was one straight out of hell, and it actually had very little to do with Taylor Kelly after all was said and done. 

Eddie's only previous experience with drugs was a little weed here and there throughout the years, so the LSD brownies hit him a little harder than it did for some of the team. He tried not to be embarrassed later on when he realized he cried in front of everyone because he was being put in handcuffs. The best part of the day was when they cleared everyone to go home and Eddie was finally able to curl himself around his pillows and wallow in self pity as he came down from his high. 

When Taylor Kelly’s story had aired, he couldn’t help but think that she was forced to put out the puff piece that it was instead of what she really wanted to air. Eddie knew she wouldn’t have cut the footage she’d gotten that way unless she was forced to, but he let himself get swept up into the celebration of the exposure the station had gotten anyways. He was just happy that he wouldn’t have to deal with that woman anymore. 

Everything seemed like it was going back to business as usual, but then Buck almost got shot. And alright, maybe Lola was never going to actually shoot him, but she was definitely in the middle of a mental break of some sorts, and Eddie had seen enough of those to be worried. He had also seen his friends get shot before, and he knew what it would feel like to lose another, but he couldn’t even begin to think of what it would do to him if he lost Buck. Even after Norman arrived and showed Lola that he did in fact see her, Eddie couldn’t seem to catch his breath properly. He watched Buck disarm Lola and they worked on getting her back up onto the overpass so he could see if she needed medical attention, and he couldn’t let out a full breath until he saw her in handcuffs and got a chance to wrap an arm around Buck’s shoulders. And, well, if he stuck a little closer than normal to Buck for the rest of their shift, no one had the heart to call him out on it. 

What Eddie never expected, however, was to be subjected to hearing Buck tell Cap all about his little run-in with Taylor Kelly at the bar the night he went out with Chim and Maddie. 

Eddie had been invited to the bar with them under the guise of a ‘boys night out’, before Buck realized his sister would be coming, but he made up an excuse revolving around Christopher. He didn’t know if he had it in him to act normal around Buck when he could tell that his feelings for him were getting a little out of control for the ‘just friends’ agreement they had come to. Once Buck started telling Cap about his hookup with the reporter, Eddie was simultaneously relieved and disappointed that he didn’t come along. 

On one hand, he thought that maybe if he had gone out with them, Buck wouldn’t have fallen into the woman’s orbit. On the other hand, if Eddie’s presence didn’t actually deter Buck from the redhead, he knew he would have been even more miserable having to see them flirt than he already was from having to hear about it second-hand. 

It ate at Eddie the rest of the week. Not only the what-ifs wrapped up in him deciding not to go to the bar that night, but also the knowledge that Buck slept with someone after ending things with Abby, and that someone wasn’t him. Eddie knew it shouldn’t have bothered him so much; it’s not like Buck made any promises to him. Thinking back to their first actual conversation in years didn’t make him feel much better; Buck had said, _’Even if we did want to continue whatever it was we had back then._ ’ Even Eddie had to admit that didn’t exactly sound like Buck wanted him back. 

Regardless, Eddie was starting to realize he might have needed to make his interest a little clearer. He started thinking that maybe Buck had gotten so used to their friendship that he didn’t see that the possibility for more was wide open. And Eddie knew it was, more clearly than ever after his missed opportunity at the bar. 

The way Buck fit himself seamlessly into his and Christopher’s lives meant more to Eddie than anything. His son adored Buck, and he knew the feeling was mutual. Buck had brought Carla into their lives, and volunteered his own time to watch Chris when she or Eddie couldn’t. When he realized he had to reach out to Shannon, Buck was there for him to talk through the emotions Eddie didn’t always like dealing with. And on top of it all, Shannon was grateful that Eddie had Buck in his and Chris’ lives, even with their history. 

Eddie was lost in his own head all week, but all it took to pull him out was one knowing look from his Abuela that Friday night over plates of steaming chilaquiles. 

Christopher was in the middle of recounting a story Buck had told him about rescuing a litter of puppies from a storm drain his very first week on the job. Eddie had heard the story before, so he was only half listening as he ate, mostly remembering how adorable Buck was while telling it to them in the first place. He chuckled to himself at the memory of Buck gesturing a bit too wildly and smacking his hand into the wall as Chris laughed. 

Eddie only noticed that Chris was finished with his story when Isabel cleared her throat to get his attention. He looked up and was met with a look he’d seen many times before, one full of mischief. He braced himself as she winked at him and turned toward Chris. 

“I think you and I are due for a sleepover, don’t you nieto?”

Eddie saw the excitement in his son’s eyes immediately. “Really? What about Daddy? He doesn’t work tomorrow and we were going to go to the museum to see the dinosaurs.”

Isabel reached out to brush a stray curl away from Chris’ face. “Your daddy has to go talk to someone tonight, but I’m sure you can still go to the museum tomorrow. I’ll even make you churro pancakes in the morning, how’s that sound?”

Chris gasped and clapped his hands together, bouncing in his seat a little. “Yay! Sounds amazing!”

Christopher was far too excited for the rest of the meal to notice the confusion painting his dad’s face or the searching looks he kept sending Isabel. Once Chris was tasked with picking a movie for him and Isabel to watch and she and Eddie were alone in the kitchen, he cornered her. 

“And who exactly do I need to talk to all of a sudden?”

She scoffed and waved her towel at him. “Oh come on, Edmundo. You know who. I’m beginning to think you actually like all the pining you’ve been doing lately. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think it was some new fangled way of courting a date.”

It was Eddie’s turn to scoff at that, attempting to deny what he already knew. “I have not been pining for anyone. What on Earth are you talking about?”

Isabel grabbed Eddie’s face in both of her hands, cradling his cheeks as she whispered, “Go tell Evan how you feel about him, mijo. I can’t bear to see all this love on your face anymore knowing the one it’s meant for has no idea.”

“How -” 

“You taught him my chile rellenos. I know you did, because he made them for me after my fall and no one else uses the right kind of queso when they make them. You never even taught Shannon any of my recipes. That means something.” She patted his cheeks as she stepped back, nodding at her grandson. “Go get your boy. And tell him I would love to teach him more of my recipes. I’m sure he would like to learn from the master, after all.”

Eddie left his abuela’s house in a daze, not even one hundred perfect sure he said goodbye to his son. 

He almost couldn’t believe it. Buck had remembered one of the recipes Eddie had taught him. A recipe he’d taught him almost eight years before and most definitely never wrote down for him. Not only did he remember it, but he remembered it well enough that Eddie’s abuela could recognize it as her own. 

Eddie didn’t even know Buck had visited his abuela after her fall. But he visited her - a woman he barely knew - and he made her one of her comfort meals using her own recipe. If Eddie weren’t already hopelessly in love with Evan Buckley, he’s sure that would have done it for him. 

He knew his abuela was right - a voice in the back of his head reminded him that she almost always was - but it was already seven o’clock on a Friday night and Eddie had no clue if Buck would even be free to talk with him. 

Sitting behind the wheel of his truck, having been effectively kicked out of his abuela’s house, Eddie shook his head and pulled out his phone to call Buck. He briefly noticed that the only numbers on his recent call log were his abuela, Chris’ school, Shannon, and Buck. And most of them were Buck. Eddie laughed at himself and rolled his eyes as he pressed the ‘call’ button. 

The phone rang twice before he heard Buck’s voice say, “Hey man, what’s up?”

“Hey, you doing anything right now?” Eddie asked, far more nervous than he realized. 

“I was just having dinner with Chim and Maddie, but uh,” Buck paused slightly, and stifled a laugh. “Something tells me they might need to have a private chat here soon, so I might be without plans in a minute. Why do you ask? I thought Isabel was having you guys for dinner.”

Eddie tried not to let his heart flutter too much at the fact that Buck seemed to be on a first name basis with his abuela. Thankful no one could see his sappy grin, Eddie shook his head again before responding. “Yeah, she was, but she kicked me out to spend some time with Chris. Basically told me to find something to do tonight. I wanted to see if you’d wanna come over to my place? Or we could go to yours, since it’s all new and fancy.”

Buck chuckled and said, “Yeah, and barely lived in. Your place feels more like home; I’d much rather hang out there. I’m assuming you already ate? I can’t imagine your abuela would kick you out without feeding you first. Something about that seems very unlike Isabel.”

“Of course she stuffed me full of food. Anything otherwise would be pure blasphemy.”

Buck’s laughter was something Eddie constantly got lost in, and it was no different then. He was so wrapped up in the warm sound that he almost missed Buck’s response. “Alright, so just let me grab a bite to eat here, and I’ll head on over. See you within the hour.”

He definitely didn’t miss the teasing tone of Chim’s voice in the background saying, “And he thinks _we’re_ dating,” before Buck cut the line. Eddie wasn’t even sure he wanted to know what that was all about. 

All he knew was that he really needed his Abuela to be right after all. 


	9. Part Nine

Buck hadn’t realized just how deep he had dug himself until his sister and Chimney started making fun of him for something they didn’t even know the half of. 

It had been months since Eddie came barreling back into Buck’s life, and they had easily fallen back into the friendship they’d started building eight years before, but they still didn’t tell anyone about the real history they had together. Hell, they barely talked about it between themselves; they definitely weren’t about to introduce anyone else to their messy past. 

Shannon was the only one that knew. Eddie had brought it up awkwardly the night he came to talk with Buck about trying to reach out to her again. He told Buck all about how they had officially called off the wedding when he got back from Mexico, how Eddie moved out, and how they raised Christopher as friends rather than partners. 

Buck tried not to be biased against Shannon, which he had been working on ever since Eddie told him about Christopher to begin with, but there was a part of him that would always remember the way she spoke to Eddie on this phone all those years ago. He couldn’t exactly help that the lens he saw her through was tinged by that encounter, and it didn’t make it any better once he found out that Chris was the ‘surprise’ she threw at Eddie on that same phone call. He even tried to understand her leaving Eddie and Chris in Texas, but he had a really hard time not being resentful of her. 

Oddly enough, what did help her image in Buck’s mind was finding out that she knew about him and Eddie all along. Eddie admitted that he told her all about his time in Mexico, including what had developed between the two of them. According to Eddie, she even told him she was happy he found someone that could make _him_ happy, because she knew that she couldn’t be that person anymore. Buck had always expected her to hold her own amount of resentment over what happened in Mexico, but that was evidently not the case at all. And once Eddie did reestablish a relationship with Shannon for Christopher’s sake, she was thrilled to hear that Eddie had found Buck again. 

But Buck still didn’t know exactly how he felt about Shannon. His feelings were far too jumbled; past and present experiences clashing in a way that made it difficult for him to see through the haze. 

He definitely didn’t know how to feel about her being the only one to know about their true history. 

Although, if Buck was being honest, he wasn’t sure how Maddie hadn’t put two and two together yet. He had told her all about his time in Mexico once he settled himself in Buffalo. She was ecstatic to hear that he had decided to go back to school, but understood why he felt the need to get away the first time. She even cried when he told her the reason he ended up staying in Mexico after Texas, but listened intently as he told her all about his sunkissed man. 

With how much Buck gushed to her about Eddie, he was eternally baffled that she couldn’t make the connection. A man named Eddie with Mexican heritage whose family was from Texas and who was in the Army? Okay, maybe that wasn’t the _most_ unique combination of things, but a man matching that exact description comes along and he and Buck have a mysterious history together strong enough to spark the kind of bond they’d found in each other that everyone could see? Yeah, Buck didn’t understand how she didn’t know already. 

But there she was, chuckling it up with Chimney, oblivious as ever. Buck was absolutely done with it, he decided. 

“You’re so right, Chim. Oh my god, my brother is dating Eddie.” Maddie laughed into her glass of wine. 

“He knows his grandmother pretty well from the sounds of it.” Chim snorted and shook his head as he reached across the table to grab a dumpling. 

Maddie scrunched her nose in delight and pointed at Buck. “You said his house ‘feels like home’. Just ask him if you can move in already, damn.”

Chim gestured vaguely with his chopsticks as he made eye contact with Buck. “Face it Buckaroo, if anyone’s dating anyone, it’s you and Eddie.” He turned to Maddie as Buck rolled his eyes, and fake-whispered, “He’s probably going over there so they can have a little ‘alone time’, if you know what I mean.”

Maddie giggled and shook her head. “Mm, no. I’ve had enough of hearing about my brother’s sexcapades for one night. Buck 1.0, Buck 2.0, I don’t care anymore. We’re not dragging Eddie into any of that.”

Buck scoffed, amused, as he leaned down to rifle through the food on the table. If Maddie couldn’t figure it out on her own, he figured he’d just have to give her a little push to help. “I mean, Eddie’s half the reason Buck 1.0 even existed in the first place, so he’s already in it.” Buck was too busy trying to sort through the food to realize that he had two utterly shocked sets of eyes locked on him. At the extended silence, he looked up and chuckled. “What? Come on Maddie, you already know that’s part of the reason I started sleeping around in college so much.” 

And, okay, obviously she _didn’t_ know that was connected to Eddie, but she really should have, and Buck was tired of waiting for her to make the connection on her own. 

She just stared at Buck like he hadn’t even spoken. Chimney, on the other hand, seemed to have his head on a swivel, looking steadily back and forth between the siblings. 

Maddie sat her glass of wine down and started slowly. “You told me that was because you were trying to forget your feelings for your Army guy from Mexico.”

“Yeah, my Army guy named Eddie. Who had just finished a tour in Afghanistan and was putting off going home to Texas. It’s the same Eddie. That’s why we’ve gotten so close so fast, Mads. We’ve already been that close, only eight years ago. And, well, actually, we were _a lot closer_ back then, if you know what I mean,” he said, mocking Chim’s earlier comment and taking a bite of pasta. Chim faked a gagging noise, despite still looking lost, and Maddie sat stock still. Buck just chuckled and swallowed his bite of food. “But that was then. Eddie and I are just friends now. We’re not dating.”

And as much as Buck didn’t want to admit it, that was the truth. He and Eddie weren’t together, no matter how much he wished they were. But he drew that line in the sand on Eddie’s first day with the 118, and from what he could tell, Eddie was perfectly content maintaining that line. So Buck didn’t push. He didn’t want to lose Eddie as a friend, and he couldn’t even imagine losing Christopher, so Buck stayed on his side of the imaginary line and let Eddie sit comfortably over on his own side. 

Chim scoffed and muttered, “Yeah, for now,” as if Buck wouldn’t hear it. 

“I could say the same to you two,” he pointed out, loading his last forkful of pasta into his mouth. 

Chimney tried deflecting by asking about Buck’s history with Eddie and how that led to Buck 1.0, but he just shook his head, grabbed a couple samosas for the road, and gestured to his sister. “Maddie can tell you. And then you guys can figure out why you’re not actually dating yet. Alright, bye, have fun. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

Buck was already through Chimney’s front door when Maddie’s voice rang out. “That doesn’t leave much, dumbass!”

He chuckled and bit into one of the samosas as he walked to the elevator. He had to admit that he actually did like having different options for food, but he still thought ‘buff-Fridays’ were a little weird. Chewing as he rode the elevator down to the garage in the basement of the apartment building, Buck thought of the unspoken agreement he and Eddie had made that first night at the bar, months before. 

Buck had been too caught up in his memories suddenly flashing back to him when Eddie showed up at the firehouse, and only realized after the shock wore off that he probably gave the other man the wrong kind of message. He knew they needed to talk, not only to catch up on more than seven years of changes, but because he desperately needed Eddie to know that he was with Abby. He realized later that he needed the reminder for himself that he wasn’t available, because even with such a large amount of time between then and the last time they’d seen each other, there was still a part of Buck that yearned to fold back into Eddie’s arms. 

So he drew his line. He didn’t deny that the feelings he had for Eddie were still there, but he didn’t outwardly admit to it either. When Eddie recovered from being turned down yet again by Buck, they were able to easily fall back into a friendship, and they became even closer than before. 

But then Abby didn’t come back, and she didn’t make any indications that she ever _would_ come back, so Buck made the final move and officially cut things off between them with a letter. He found an apartment of his own, and no one even commented on how close it was to Eddie’s house despite being more expensive than the one he looked at that was two blocks from the firehouse. A part of him itched to re-download one of his hook up apps, but there was something about having Eddie back in his life that stopped him. Why would he revert back to the behavior that started as a result of losing Eddie when Eddie was right there? 

Buck wasn’t really sure what happened with Taylor Kelly. Maybe it was a little bit like meeting a celebrity for him. He could admit that he was a little starstruck once he realized that was who they were saving that morning, and when she turned out to be gorgeous on top of it all, he was definitely a little smitten at first, but the whole ordeal with her news feature of the 118 rubbed him the wrong way. At first he was flattered, thinking that maybe she cut out anything negative because she liked him, but he was borderline enraged to find out that she actually _wanted_ to show the world the shitshow of a day that they had and run their station’s name through the mud. He could not, no matter what, see her side of things; what good could come out of doing that? What purpose would it serve to run a story like that other than to embarrass him and his coworkers? What kind of person did that make her that she wanted to keep that footage?

But then he had to bear witness to Chimney and his sister flirt with each other all night when he _thought_ they were having a guys night. By the time those two had taken the stage for karaoke, Buck was about ready to drink himself into a stupor, or better yet, call Eddie to yell at him for not coming with them so he could have someone to commiserate with. 

Then Taylor Kelly sent him that drink. 

He still didn’t like her, and at first, he thought he was going to go over and tear her a new one all over again, but something stopped him. Something made him sit down and actually talk to her. _Something_ made him back her into a bathroom stall and fuck her against the wall. 

Buck didn’t know what that ‘something‘ was, but it confused him to no end. He didn’t think he was that kind of guy anymore. He’d made it months and months without sex, even before he broke things off with Abby. Buck couldn’t for the life of him figure out what made him jump at Taylor Kelly, but in the end, he boiled it down to hate-sex and made himself stop dwelling on it. 

It did make him realize that he missed being with another person like that, however. And not just in a sexual way, either. The longer Buck went being single and _not_ seeking the warmth of a stranger’s bed, the more he realized he missed the pure human connection he had with Abby, and far before that, with Eddie. And sure, he and Eddie were closer than ever at that point, but Buck knew they were missing something. Buck had tried to convince himself that he was perfectly fine over on his side of the line he’d drawn between them, because he thought Eddie was as well, over on his side, but he wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to be able to go on like that when there was no real reason that he and Eddie weren’t both barrelling over that line and crashing back into one another. 

Buck made up his mind on the drive to Eddie’s that night; he needed to know if anything beyond friendship was still possible between them. He at the very least needed Eddie to know how he felt and hoped beyond all hope that his feelings would still be returned. 

It was already starting to get dark by the time Buck pulled into Eddie’s driveway beside his truck, and it seemed that Eddie had left the porch light on for him, which Buck noted with a small smile. He let himself in, like Eddie had told him earlier before he hung up the phone, and he kicked his shoes off as he pulled the door closed behind him. Buck dropped his own keys next to Eddie’s in the bowl on the table by the door and called out, “Hey Eds, I’m here.”

“I’m in the kitchen,” came back from that direction. 

As Buck rounded the corner, he was met with the, quite frankly, adorable sight of Eddie Diaz taking a bag of popcorn out of the microwave, not expecting it to be as hot as it was, and hissing as he tossed the bag from hand to hand, trying not to burn his fingers. Buck snorted and tried to contain his smirk as Eddie dropped the bag on the counter and turned around. 

“Shut up,” Eddie said, trying and failing to be stern, laughter tracing his words. 

“Didn’t say anything,” Buck said through a grin. “You good?”

“Yup. Popcorn’s ready.”

Buck just laughed and walked toward the fridge, pulling out two beers before peeking back around the fridge door. “Did you already grab one?” At the shake of Eddie’s head, he closed the door and set one of the bottles in front of him, next to the bag of popcorn that the other man was staring at like it offended him. Buck popped his lid off and took a long drink from the bottle. He used it to gesture at the bag of popcorn. “At least you didn’t burn it.”

“No, it just burnt me instead,” Eddie mumbled, picking up his beer and twisting the lid off. 

Buck sidled up next to him and bumped into him with his hip, reaching out to grab Eddie’s free hand. “Want me to kiss it and make it better?”

Eddie paused mid-drink and looked at Buck with wide eyes, before he lowered the bottle and sheepishly answered, “Uh, yeah, sure.”

Buck was pretty sure he stopped giving a fuck the second he walked through Chimney’s door that night, and that didn’t change at all when he came through Eddie’s. 

Buck brought his other hand down to gently grasp Eddie’s wrist as he brought the injured hand to his mouth. Eddie’s breath audibly hitched in his throat as he watched the movement intently, occasionally popping his eyes back up to Buck’s face, as if to read his reaction as well. Buck didn’t know what was on his face, but he didn’t care about that either, as he slowly leaned down and kissed the tips of every finger on Eddie’s hand, one by one. When he was done, he rotated Eddie’s hand ever so slightly and laid one last kiss on the palm of his hand, before curling his fingers inward and lowering Eddie’s hand back to the counter. 

Buck took a step back and watched Eddie’s face go through at least five different expressions in less than five seconds. He leaned his arms against the counter and waited for Eddie to catch his eyes. When he did, his mouth was open like he was about to say something, but no words came out, so Buck took that as his cue. 

“Okay, I definitely didn’t mean for us to have this conversation like this, but I think it’s as good a time as any. So here it goes…” Buck took a deep breath and straightened himself out. “I think, if you’re still interested, that we should try to get back to how things were back in Mexico. I know it’s been a few months since we talked about this last, and that we’ve gotten really close as friends again, and I don’t want to lose that. Eddie, you are so important to me, no matter what. Even if your feelings have changed and you don’t want to be anything more than friends, I completely understand and I don’t want this to change anything about that. But I also know that we would be good together. And I know that, at one point, you wanted that too. I said a lot of things changed, and you said that some things didn’t. I never said it back, but they didn’t change for me either. 

“I thought about you for years after Mexico, Eddie. I thought about everything that I never thought I would get to have. And when I saw you standing there in the station that day, I thought I was hallucinating. I thought everything I’d been trying to hide from myself for years had finally come crashing back into me and made me see something that wasn’t real. But it was real. You came back to me, and yeah, so many things have changed since that summer, but so many things have stayed the same. I still feel like my heart is going to beat out of my chest every time you give me one of your smiles, your _real_ smiles, the ones not everyone gets to see. I still get all tingly any time you brush against my lower back, even if they’re accidents. I still want to wrap you up in a blanket and protect you from the world any time that little crease between your eyes comes out, because I know that means you’re dealing with something nasty. I still have all these feelings for you, Eddie, and they’re just bursting to get out, to show you how I feel about you and show you how much -”

“Evan, shut up,” Eddie said, cutting him off with a hand on his arm, laughter shaking his own shoulders. 

He was...laughing?

Buck didn’t know what that meant, but he couldn’t imagine Eddie would ever _laugh_ at him for confessing his feelings. He knew it had to be something else, not that he could think of what that might have been, so he did what Eddie said, and he listened. 

“Abuela is never going to let me live this down.” Eddie shook his head and stepped closer to Buck. He placed his hands on Buck’s shoulders and caught his eyes. “I still feel the same. I haven’t changed my mind. I am so hopelessly and completely _gone_ for you that my Abuela kicked me out of family dinner so I could come confess my feelings to you and stop pining, as she said.”

Buck's heart stuttered in his chest. “You still feel the same?”

Eddie’s hands slid up to cradle Buck’s face and he smiled softly. “I never stopped.” 

Buck’s hands instinctually landed on the swell of Eddie’s hips as their lips met, and all of the feelings he had tried to block out over the years washed over him at once. 

They had been in the same position before, but there were so many subtle differences that it made it feel brand new once again. 

Somehow, they were in two places at once. They were both eight years younger, in a humid Mexican apartment, pressed against the wood of the front door, exploring the feeling of coming together for the first time. They were both older again, in the kitchen of Eddie’s home, sides digging awkwardly into the counter, learning all over again how to move against each other and with each other. The memories were too plentiful to be forgotten, but the differences were so vast that it was like their first kiss all over again. 

By the time Buck finally pulled back, he knew that he had recovered what was missing from his and Eddie’s relationship. As he ran a hand up and down Eddie’s side, he thought about how much better they were once they crashed past the line of friendship and into new territory. 


	10. Part Ten

Eddie had thought about what it would be like to be with Evan again. He had thought about it probably more than he should have. For years, those kinds of thoughts were distant fantasies in which the Evan in them was the Evan he knew in Mexico, with only slight changes occasionally making their way in. Once Eddie moved to California, those fantasies were no longer quite so distant. His mind was never creative enough to imagine Evan as anything but an older version of the sweet, punk-rock bartender he’d been years before. But then he turned out to be a just as sweet, totally built firefighter and the fantasies definitely changed to accommodate that. 

Even still, no fantasies could compare once Eddie actually had his hands on the other man again. That didn’t stop his brain from comparing the Evan from his memories to the Buck of the present, of course. His brain also seemed to insist on making a distinction between Evan and Buck, almost as if they were two separate people instead of one person with eight years of differences. 

Evan was the twenty year old Eddie spent the better part of four straight days becoming familiar with before leaving the country and never speaking to again. 

Buck was his twenty-eight year old best friend that Eddie was constantly learning more about as the months wore on. 

Evan had always been taller than Eddie, but he was lanky, with just the barest hints of power underneath his lean muscles. 

There was nothing lean or lanky about Buck, muscles always visible and rippling with the power contained within. 

And the way Buck crowded Eddie against the back of his own bedroom door was worlds away from the way Evan had pressed him against the front door of his apartment that day, years before.

As Eddie slid his hands under the hem of Buck’s shirt, he could finally feel the miles of muscles he’d tried not to stare at in the locker room at work throughout the past months. He could feel them shift under his hands as Buck pulled away from their kiss and leaned his head down to mouth at Eddie’s neck. His fingers clenched uselessly against Buck’s skin as a small bite landed on the meat of his neck and a low moan ripped its way out from the back of his throat. 

Eddie felt Buck smile against his neck as he kissed the spot he just bit. “I take it you still like that?” he mumbled against Eddie’s skin, leaving kisses all along the expanse of his neck as he made his way slowly toward his mouth, reminding Eddie’s brain that Buck knew what Eddie liked because _Evan_ knew what he liked, and they were in fact the same person.

Eddie ignored Buck’s comment in favor of kissing the smirk off his face, sliding one of his hands down to grip at Buck’s waist, and moving the other up just underneath his peck. As Eddie nipped at Buck’s bottom lip, a soft gasp escaped him and his hands left the wall beside Eddie’s head to cradle his neck and deepen the kiss, which was exactly the kind of opening he was hoping for. Chasing Buck’s tongue with his own, Eddie used the leverage he had to flip their positions and pin Buck to the wall next to the door. The resulting groan that flavored their kiss was just the sound Eddie was trying to elicit. 

Slotting a leg between Buck’s, Eddie pulled away from the kiss, pressed his hips forward, and asked cheekily, “I take it you still like being manhandled?”

Buck let out a breathy chuckle and nodded slightly, eyes dark with obvious lust. “Yeah. Maybe more now that it doesn’t happen that often. It’s not that easy anymore. Can’t just pick me up and toss me around nowadays.”

The memories of Eddie doing just that to a much smaller Evan - picking him up, his legs wrapped around Eddie’s waist as he carried him across the room only to throw him onto the bed and climb on top of him - quickly flooded his mind and he unintentionally let out a little growl, gaining a quirked eyebrow from Buck. 

Eddie did the math in his head as he held Buck against the wall. He knew what his limits were in the weight room and, thanks to Buck's constant bragging about his DXA scans, Eddie was pretty familiar with the other man’s build. He could still do it, he decided quickly. 

Eddie smirked and shifted so Buck’s legs were on either side of his. “Wanna bet?” he asked, already moving his hands down to the backs of his thighs. 

Buck laughed. “As much as I love bets, I highly doubt you - oh _fuck_.”

Eddie’s hands were gripped right under Buck’s ass as he hoisted him up and pressed him tight against the wall. Buck’s long legs hooked around Eddie’s back, pulling them closer together. He leaned in and laid an open mouthed kiss to Buck’s neck. “You were saying?”

He threw his head back until it hit the wall and groaned so deeply Eddie felt it more than heard it. “Fuck. Okay, that was even hotter than the last time you did that.”

Eddie hummed as he kissed a path up Buck’s neck. He nipped at an earlobe and chuckled. “Kinda miss the earrings, not gonna lie. Coulda kept at least one of ‘em, just for the hell of it.”

Buck lifted his head enough to capture Eddie’s lips in a messy kiss and only pulled away to whisper, “What if I told you I got a new piercing?”

Eddie’s breath caught in his throat and his hands squeezed tighter on Buck’s thighs at the implication. If Buck had a piercing in any _normal_ area, Eddie would have seen it by then. That left very few options, all of which had Eddie’s head spinning with lust. “Where?” he asked slowly, the sound barely clawing its way out of the back of his throat. 

Buck scratched a hand over the short hairs on the back of Eddie’s head and chuckled. “How ‘bout you do what you did last time you had me up against a wall like this? That way you can find out yourself. It can be like a scavenger hunt.”

Eddie laughed as he shifted his weight enough to support Buck without the wall behind him. He smirked into a kiss as he swallowed the gasp that turned into a moan when Eddie pressed Buck even closer to him and walked him to the bed. Knowing exactly what Buck wanted, he tapped his fingers to the back of his thighs to signal him to let go. Eddie pulled away from the kiss just as Buck’s legs unhooked and he used his leftover momentum to toss him onto the bed. 

As Buck bounced on the mattress, the bedframe let out a loud creaking noise that made both men pause and look at each other with wide eyes and bated breath. Buck was the first one to laugh, but Eddie followed close behind after the bed made no further protests. He slowly climbed onto the bed just in case it made any more noises and when all seemed to be fine, he bracketed his forearms around Buck’s head and leaned down to rest his forehead against Buck’s. “Something tells me the issue isn’t with whether I _can_ , but whether I _should_.”

Buck’s blue eyes sparkled with amusement and Eddie knew he was likely to get lost in them for as long as the other man would let him. Pulled back to the surface by the hands settling on his lower back, Eddie heard Buck say, “I thought for a second the bed was going to give out underneath me.” Eddie’s fingers played with the curls coming loose from the hair gel at the top of Buck’s head as he continued. “But I think we just need to get you a new, studier bed frame. Because you definitely _should_. Like I said, very hot indeed.”

“Mm, is that so?” Eddie asked, laughing even as he started lowering his head. 

Buck nodded, a smirk plastered across his face. Eddie closed the distance and covered Buck’s mouth with his own. The kiss was colored with laughter, so much so that it could barely be called a kiss, but to Eddie it was perfect. 

Like getting back from a long shift to a hug from Christopher and a meal from Abuela. 

Coming together with Buck - with _Evan_ \- like that felt like finally coming home after years spent apart. 

He had ran to Evan years before, even if unintentionally, as a way to avoid going home. Eddie knew then that he had nowhere else to run. He was finally home, finally where he belonged, in Evan Buckley’s arms, with a life that felt more right than ever before. 

\- - - 

When Eddie slowly drifted into consciousness the next morning, his brain hadn’t fully caught up with the events of the night before. As the morning sun filtered through the curtains, he curled inward on himself enough to garner a soft squeeze from the arm around his chest. For a split second, Eddie’s mind supplied the image of a twenty year old Evan, dark hair, piercings, and all, as the owner of the warmth surrounding him, but glancing down, his eyes caught on the black bands of the tattoo Evan hadn’t had back then, and he couldn’t help the fond smile that took over his face as he came fully awake. 

Eddie shifted his arm down so he could grasp Buck’s hand in his and cuddled back into the body pressed behind him. Buck chuckled, a low, sleepy sound from the back of his throat, as he nuzzled his nose into Eddie’s hair. 

“Morning,” Buck’s gravely voice whispered in Eddie’s ear. 

He squeezed Buck’s hand in response and sighed happily. “God I missed this.”

Buck chuckled, the sound just as low as his morning voice. “Haven’t cuddled anyone in a while, I take it?”

Eddie lifted Buck’s hand to his face so he could kiss it softly before turning around to face him. He wrapped his own arm around Buck’s waist and pulled them flush together. “I meant, I missed waking up next to you like this.” Eddie leaned in and kissed him softly, despite both of their obvious morning breath. 

Buck chuckled and gave Eddie another quick peck. “Mm, yeah, I could definitely get used to this again. Any chance we could do like we did back then and spend all day in bed together?”

“As much as I would love to say yes, I kind of promised Chris I would take him to the museum today.” Eddie leaned his forehead against Buck’s and his hand drifted in circles on his back, moving mostly unconsciously. 

“To look at the dinosaurs?”

Eddie laughed. “Of course. You know how excited he was about that new exhibit that opened up. He’s been begging me for weeks to take him.”

Buck smiled and let out a little huff of a laugh. “Yeah, he asked me if I could take him last week.”

“You should come today.” The words were out before Eddie even thought about them, but he didn’t regret them once they were said. 

“Oh, no, that’s a you and Chris thing. I don’t want to intrude.” “Evan, for one, you just said he asked you to take him. Obviously he wants you there too. For two, you are part of this family. You were even before last night; now you just are in a different way. But you belong at any and all family activities you want to come to from now on out, this included.” Eddie took a second to soak in the flush he was seeing on Buck’s cheeks and continued, voice soft with affection. “And if we hurry, we might even make it for Abuela’s famous churro pancakes. At the very least, I know you’re in for a very long hug and probably too many kisses when we get over there.”

Buck laughed. “No such thing as too many kisses from Abuela.”

“See? You’re a part of the family already. Now c’mon. Pancakes are waiting.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there we are!  
> As always, comments are food for my soul, and kudos fuel my heart, so I would LOVE to hear from you if you feel so inclined.
> 
> Please check out all the other amazing fics and art pieces created for the [Buddie Big Bang 2020](https://buddiebigbang.tumblr.com/) and keep an eye out for more in the upcoming days!


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